I’ve been waiting to write all of you about my new full-length collection of poems, The Glass Is Already Broken, until the publisher got the cover colors corrected. Three books later, that has not happened yet. The cover art by my dear friend Jarrod Beck keeps being reproduced in an orange-y tone rather than the clear yellow of the original; the lettering comes through as dark brown rather than black.
Read moreExhausted
For months, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, lay parked on the far end of my dining room table. I’d borrowed it from a friend late last summer, and been neglectful about returning it, thinking I’d pick Caste up any day and begin to read what I knew was such an important book for the times in which we live.
Read moreSmooth Pain
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about a few ideas I have with all the things going on in our country,” Tarray messaged me yesterday while I was thinking about what I would write this week, knowing no white woman’s words could be as important as hers and theirs---my Touchstone girls, their poems and stories about violence and abuse in their black and brown lives, my passion to get them out into the bigger world. How I’d wanted the privileged milieu I inhabited to grasp what labeled these young women as delinquent—I wanted them to understand what led them to do the sometimes lawless stuff they did, the drug use and selling, the prostitution, the truancy, the assaults. That’s why I’d brought them to so many reading venues, started the joint group with The Hotchkiss School girls, tried so long and hard to get I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent published. And now, why I’m rejoicing that it has been, especially now.
Read moreWaiting
I was waiting to do this post until I got my books and could write about how I felt when I opened the box and actually saw them—the real thing—not the copied pages, the ARC, the digital version—but they haven’t yet arrived.
As I was sitting outside for a brief respite from the computer, dreaming a bit in the sun, all the other things I was waiting for flooded my mind—the arrival of those books, a haircut appointment, word from Politics and Prose about a hoped-for Crowdcast video for I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, for the overgrown lawn to be mowed, for the grass seed in its bare spots to sprout, for my puppy Stella to finish her heat, for the time and energy to clean up my thousands of emails, to write a new poem, to put together another poetry collection.
Read moreThe Rewrite
Where to begin? Well, why not with the first prompt I always give my writing groups: “this is the way it is right now?” That’s also the title of the last chapter of my forthcoming memoir, I Am NOT a Juvenile Delinquent. Since one of my spiritual teachers spoke those words to me at a very troubled time in my life, I have found them immensely comforting.
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