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 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 more“PERFECTIONISM IS THE SCARIEST WORD I KNOW”
This sentence, a quote from Kathleen Norris, who writes movingly in many books of grappling with perfectionism and her spiritual journey, was to be the title of one of the sections in my upcoming memoir, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, about my similar struggles. But I had to cut it when my editor suggested that three sections would work better than the five I’d originally had. As usual, she was correct.
But its personal resonance has never left me; this morning during a very challenging zoom yoga class with a new teacher, its noisy dictates blared back to me as I struggled to get the unfamiliar poses exactly right.
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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