For the Ladies

If you don't already know about it and you're a female + writer, check out the website She Writes. This is a wonderful community of thousands of writers at every stage in their process, from diary writer to bestselling author. I was recently a judge for one of the groups within She Writes called Mother Writer and let me tell you I read some truly amazing pieces. She Writes is celebrating its one year birthday, and is growing more and more each day. Authors like Kathryn Harrison, Dani Shapiro, and Meg Waite Clayton are all here.

http://www.shewrites.com/

If you're a woman, come join in, stay a while, meet some wonderful authors and get fresh ideas about how to market yourself. It's a little like Facebook in that you create your own profile page and it's free, but it's so much more interactive. I have met some of the most remarkable women writers on this site! Oh, and did I mention, the site is for any woman in any country. Yep, you could be from the Arctic Circle, that is if you have internet access.

Another poem, another night.

Jack
by Maxine Kumin
How pleasant the yellow butter melting on white kernels, the meniscus of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon: our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28 which calibrates to 84 in people years and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster at 22. Every year, the end of summer lazy and golden, invites grief and regret: suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us, winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them, a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters. That spring, in the bustle of grooming and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following fall she sold him down the river. I meant to but never did go looking for him, to buy him back and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order. Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone did you remember that one good winter?

Lorine Niedecker

This is a little poem I love very much from Lorine Niedecker, a wonderful poet from Wisconsin, and a recent discovery of mine (with the help of another). Since I am writing about fall and the Northern hardwood landscape in my second novel, this struck me tonight.

               Fall

        We must pull
        the curtains—
        we haven't any
        leaves

Please, Go

That is: please go see the movie "Please Give." I haven't been to a theater in months, and then it was almost a year before that, and tonight's movie is going to change my prior movie-house laziness. Yes, I paid nine dollars for a ticket and even more for my popcorn and iced tea (I can't seem to attend a movie without these things or at least some iteration of them), but it was all worth it. This movie charmed me in ways I didn't know I could be charmed anymore. It made me a little bit sad, too, but nothing that didn't quickly soften from red antique chair to busy street.

Ah, St. Louis, sometimes you really have me. Tonight, hot as it is, I loved you walking down Delmar with my mother at half past nine o'clock.

Summer Writer's Institute

As you all know, I am teaching the Fiction Workshop at the Summer Writer's Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. It is going beautifully; I have six wonderful writers at all levels and all ages, from an Emory student to a retiree, who has been wanting to write his whole life. Each morning we set off to workshopping in a lovely old building with windows on all sides and each morning they make me want to sit down and get to work on my own writing. People don't mention this enough: the effect students have on teachers. I will be sad to say goodbye to them next week. They are instant motivation, a wonderful reminder that I can always do a little bit better in my own work.

So, for now, it's love then...

Blurb for The Bird Sisters by Robin Antalek

"In The Bird Sisters, Rebecca Rasmussen has created the ultimate literary heroines with Milly and Twiss. Heartbreakingly brave as they are fragile, the sisters endure despite the failings of love both familial and romantic, of promises not kept, of dreams deferred and the price one pays for keeping secrets. In prose that sings, Rasmussen has created a magical world where you will believe that birds – and perhaps even humans -- no matter how broken -- will soar under the capable ministrations of Milly and Twiss."

--Robin Antalek, Author of The Summer We Fell Apart

My Grandmother Kathryn and her sister Virginia (AKA Milly and Twiss)