writing

Something my father wrote

2019/10/20

Tomorrow would have been my father’s 88th birthday. The following is something he wrote in September 1998, apparently for one of the classes he was taking to get his massage therapist license. (Though he never did massage as anything other than a side gig—he was an attorney—he continued to take courses on subjects related to massage and healing until his health began to decline.) I have made a couple rounds of copy edits to fix small stuff and enhance readability.
Continue reading

Morning-after musings

2017/12/08

Last night, I was the featured poet at Everett Poetry Night for the first time. This slot had been scheduled months ago, but recent developments (mostly related to the misbehavior of my car, and my lack of funds to get the needed repairs right away) had me wondering whether or not I would be able to go. But, having skipped the trip to Everett for the last several weeks already, I was determined to not flake out on the one night I had obligated myself to go.

I gave myself plenty of time to run into problems and still get there—which is pretty much what happened. Then it was simply a matter of waiting the five-and-a-half hours for my turn to get on stage and read some of my poems. Eventually, of course, the time came. Continue reading

It won’t be long now: ‘Dear Thursday…’

2017/10/13

Today’s entry in the Love Notes to the Days of the Week series is no. 359—which means it is almost time to start preparing the ‘Dear Thursday…’ volume for publication, as this coming Thursday will be the last entry for Year Four. I expect to have everything put together and ready to go before the end of November.

Until then, I am putting the finishing touches on 8: Eight-word Poems, and have started sorting through the material for what I am still calling The Lilac Years.

And I must get my proper website back up and running. I had started rebuilding it with the assumption that The Lilac Years would be out around this time, so I have some changes to make to what I have already done. I am aiming for having the basic site back online by the end of the month.

Stay tuned!

(13 October 2017)

October writing challenge?

2017/10/01

Well, I don’t have much excuse this time—I had plenty of time to think it over—but I have not yet settled on my writing challenge for October. One thought that occurred to me was to try writing without articles, but then, after completing a poem this last week that I had originally started in early September, I considered picking out earlier poems and doing extensive revisions or complete rewrites.

I’m going to poke around to see if there is a form I am curious about trying, or if there is some other challenge to be had. I figure I have a few hours to make my choice.

For now, I have a noisy cat to placate. I shall be back.

(1 October 2017)

I just have to say this real quick-like…

2017/04/24

As I sometimes do, I was writing poems while waiting for tonight’s open mic to start. After one or two ‘ regular’ poems, I thought I would do something different: I filled a whole page of my ginormous sketchbook/journal with a single poem.

But here’s how I did it: I wrote alternate lines from the top down and bottom up of the page—and alternated sides of the page as well. The result is that some ‘stanzas’ as they appear on the page make sense, while others make no sense at all. I have noooooo idea how I am going to arrange this one when I transfer it to my present Word file…

(24 April 2017)