writing
Women Writers and the Story Circle Network
More than twenty years ago, I coauthored a book with an attorney. Not only did it get published, it was also translated into Spanish. The topic, the momentum for its topic, seems basically gone now. Some technical and business magazines published a few articles I wrote. I wrote some safety manuals, other technical stuff, rather boring, uninspiring. Then I discovered the Story Circle Network.
The Story Circle Network inspired me to write creatively again–once upon a time in high school my poetry was published. Then I quit writing for years. When I started again, it was technical or business writing. If you want to write your stories, read other women’s stories, just explore fiction, poetry, travel writing, you name it, join this organization. It changed not only my writing life, but my life in a broader sense. Through it I met not only other writers, I also became a board member, made new friends who write and share. This inspiring organization not only provides classes, publishes, but also hosts various writing contests and a biannual conference. In the middle of April, I will head to Austin for the conference. The keynote speaker is no other than Brooke Warner, the woman who founded She Writes Press. Go to http://www.storycircle.org to learn more about the conference and the just announced winners of the Sarton Women’s Literary Awards, become inspired, create, publish, grow. Without this organization, I seriously doubt I would have written my book of poetry, published by Uno Mundo Press in April 2014.
Because of comments from readers of this book, inspiration from friends, and personal interests, I am now working on another book.
I offer thanks to the Story Circle Network for renewing my writing life.
Rewriting Religion: the radical poetry of Aemilia Bassano Lanier by Mary Sharratt
This illustrates how recently in history English speaking women have gained the right to openly display their talents, how hard won these gains have been. These rights can just be as easily be lost unless we remain vigilant.
Aemilia Bassano Lanier (also spelled Lanyer) is the heroine of my new novel The Dark Lady’s Mask. Born in 1569, she was the highly educated daughter of an Italian court musician—a man thought to have been a Marrano, a secret Jew living under the guise of a Christian convert. She may have also been the mysterious, musical Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, although most academic scholars dispute this. What we do know for a fact and what really matters is that she was the first woman in England to pursue a career as a published poet.
In Italy women such as Isabella Andreini published plays and poetry on a wide variety of secular subjects, but in England Lanier effectively had only one option—to write devotional Protestant verse. Her English literary predecessors, Anne Locke and Mary Sidney, wrote poetic meditations on the Psalms.
But Lanier turned this…
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2016 Africa Reading Challenge
Want something new to read, what to expand your knowledge of the wider world, read literature from Africa, Latin America, anywhere that is not your culture.
Welcome to the Africa Reading Challenge.
This will be the fourth time that I’m hosting the Africa Reading Challenge. Details and requirements are the same this year as for the 2012 Africa Reading Challenge, which started with: “I have absolutely no reason for hosting nor urging you to participate in this challenge save for the joy of discovering and reading African literature!” Here are the details:
Challenge Period
January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016
Region
The entire African continent, including its island-states, which are often overlooked. Please refer to this Wikipedia “list of sovereign states and dependent territories in Africa”. Pre-colonial empires and regions are also included.
Reading Goal
5 books. That’s it. There will be no other levels. Of course, participants are encouraged to read more than 5 books. Eligible books include those which are written by African writers, or take place in Africa, or are…
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Hey poets, be good literary citizens. No more excuses.
This post reiterates advice I would give myself. Additionally, I would add something I wish I had known a year ago before my book of poetry was published. No one told me that most writing contests require unpublished work. If you want to enter poetry contests, enter before you publish. Many contests even include work published in blogs as previously published. I continue to hunt for contests that allow previously published work. It seems few exist. If any of you writers out there know about such a contest, please let me know.
With AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) and National Poetry Month just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a working poet. I’ve got a couple of projects in the works for the month of April (updates to come soon) but I keep coming back to a piece of advice I’m always giving my students, which is that poetry doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Poetry is about the poet but it’s also about the community where the poet lives and works.
Admittedly, the idea of community is constantly evolving. Your community can be your workplace, the local bookstore or coffee shop you frequent or your local library. However, community can also mean something much bigger, especially in the wake Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I’ve blogged about my love affair with social media and the poetry world. This love centers around the fact that Facebook…
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Brilliant books by brilliant writers
In case you are looking for something new to read. I would add any book by Leslie Marmon Silko. My all time favorite book, “Storyteller”, written by her contains a story I must have read 50 times, “Yellow Woman”.
And all these writers are women.
I spotted this list of 30 books by women in my Facebook newsfeed — the always-glorious Lidia Yuknavitch shared it — and I loved the first line of the intro:
“Let’s be real: You should be reading books, and books by women, every month of the year.”
Amen!
But yes, it’s Women’s History Month here in the states, and while Emily Temple, author of this listicle, claims, “That women have contributed just as much to our literary culture as men doesn’t even need to be said,” I think, sadly, it does. We need to say it again and again, not just this month but every month.
So read a bunch of books by women. And the ones you don’t finish? Well, there’s always next month, and the month after that, and the rest of the year.
Need a hint of where to start? There are a bunch…
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Haiku Adventure-Part Seven
This rather short adventure was an experiment soon to end. Since my haiku posts generated so many positive responses, I may consider its continuance. My most recent adventure, however, is to take Word Press’ Blogging 101 in spite of the fact that I have been blogging for more than three years. I feel certain I can learn something new. For now here is another haiku.
Three large purple onions
waiting
mother’s old stoneware bowl.
Haiku Adventure–Part Two
After receiving positive feedback on the following three poems, I learned that two of them cannot be haiku. Why? They instruct, give directions. Such teaching is forbidden in haiku. Regardless, I decided to post them anyway. At least the Meditations will illustrate what not to do if you want to write real haiku.
Meditations
shut your eyes, be still
listen to the wind, rain, thunder
shut your eyes, be still
open your eyes, be still
watch coyote and bobcat climb
open yours eyes, be still
There are several other reasons why these two poems cannot be haiku–more than one image and a contrasting image in a single poem–forbidden. I knew there must be some reason I had never previously seriously attempted haiku. Too many rules.
This one, however, meets modern haiku standards or so I have been told. I will eventually get this. Learning, challenging oneself, remains a positive experience.
Night
big dipper illuminates
clouds race
darkness suddenly descends
Haiku Adventure
Since I felt out of sync with writing and accomplishing little in that vein, I decided I needed a challenge. In spite of two published books, one instructive, non-fiction and the other a book of poems, I never attempted writing haiku. Even though I probably, due to teaching schedule among other activities like singing and horses, cannot write one haiku a day, I committed to writing seven a week. The first thing I noticed is the difficulty. Haiku poems may be short; however, getting them even close to “right” remains quite difficult, a real challenge. Here are the first three written this week:
milkweed rising to the sun
wait for monarchs
who never ever come
cirrocumulus clouds fly
across an azure sky
snowflakes and cottonballs
OPI Bogota Blackberry
on my freshly scrubbed feet
walks along in wonder
Who Is the Best Writer: A Matter of Taste and Viewpoint
Until I was asked to be a judge for a memoir competition, I did not spend a lot of time thinking about this topic. For years my general awareness about writing preferences included the knowledge that the writers I prefer and usually read rarely hit the best seller list and generally are not white, main stream USA. What do I read: Native American (American Indian), Indian as in the country of India, and Latin American writers, and writers from the Middle East, especially Iran. My favorite writer is Leslie Marmon Silko. My favorite book of hers is Storyteller. My favorite story, “Yellow Woman”, is in that book as well as numerous literary anthologies. I estimate I have read that story at least fifty times, maybe more. Why? In spite of asking myself that question, I remain somewhat clueless. Because of my current teaching assignment which includes British literature from Beowulf to now, I try my best to read a bunch of British literature. For instance, I just read I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Of course, it has nothing to do with Britain; perhaps it does not count. Next on my list is The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2006. Although she writes in English, she obviously is not British unless you consider being in a former British colony counts as British.
Back to my contest assignment: Two of the books I was assigned to read nearly put me to sleep. One did not; in fact I liked it a lot–enough to mark pages with passages I plan to use when I need writing inspiration/ideas later. When I read a bunch of reviews recently, it came as quite a shock to find one of those put-me-to-sleep books favorably reviewed. Could I really have been that far off base? I consider the possibility that even though I have read some excellent memoirs, I find many of them impossible to read. Why? From my viewpoint, many memoirs whine, lament, and carry on about the past in a way I find highly objectionable. Who wants to read hundreds of pages about how someone overcame addiction or some hideous disease or a divorce? Apparently, a lot of people. Even though I consider The Glass Castle an excellent book, I even had a difficult time plugging through the last 50 pages of that one. Some of Storyteller is a memoir–a combination of poetry, vignettes, photos, but it also includes several enlightening short stories. While writing now and reflecting, I can only think of one other memoir type book, I actually recommend to people, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand. While stopping by the library this morning, I did pick up Willie Nelson’s latest, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. It even has a foreword by Kinky Friedman, who in my opinion would make a much better governor than any one we have experienced in Texas lately or will have for the foreseeable future. With a title like that, about Willie, and Kinky thrown in, surely it won’t be too boring.
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