In the inbox

     I have a couple of picture books that I am sending out and about unagented. Primarily for fun, but also to keep track of where they have been (I so need a secretary!), I have decided to log by rejection letters on my blog. I am eliminating the name of the sender, but otherwise they will not be fiddled with. Here is the latest;

Dear Ms. Truax,

Thank you for submitting The Three Sisters to Sky Pony Press. After careful deliberation we have decided to pass on your manuscript as we feel it does not quite lend itself well to our list. Best of luck in finding another publishing house for your book.
All the best,

A New Project

     Today I began a new gig that will undoubtedly make 2014 different and memorable.
     The current poet laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Kimberly Cloutier Green, has designed and launched her project to bring poetry to the larger community, which she has named Poetry's HeART.

      I am serving as one of the facilitators of a Creation Circle where, working with a group of women who have signed up for the duration, we will be exploring and stretching the creative process of making poems and other types of art. Kimberly has envisioned that we will all (more than 100 participants) respond to the same initial prompt. It is a fragment of a poem she never finished but that has stayed with her.

     Stranger, orphan, outlaw, beloved... How will we live our lives, so many hungers upon us?

     Today, in the first of six monthly meetings, my group explored poems that touch in some way upon the idea of strangeness; being a stranger, seeing a stranger, being strange, a strange place, seeing something familiar with new eyes, feeling how we do and do not fit in.

     You can hear one of the poems we read and discussed here;


      Reverie in Open Air by Rita Dove : Poetry Magazine


      Over the course of the next thirty days we will see what comes to us creatively in response to thinking about this subject. I invite you to join us from wherever you are. There are no rules, or right or wrong way to respond. Perhaps you will write a poem, a haiku, a short story. Perhaps you will sculpt, paint, draw, photograph, or compose something. Feel free to post a response here.