The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
~Emily Dickenson

Some people would raise their eyebrows and shake their heads to know that I mark up my books a lot as I read them. I guess it’s rude in a way, if you think about the next person who might pick up the book [...]

If you are aware that you need to be brave, you are probably on the threshold of writing something that matters.
Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and With Others (2003, pg. 172)
During the last week in April I attended an AWA writing-group leadership training with poet Patricia Lee Lewis at The Crossings in Austin, Texas. Patricia, along [...]

From now until midnight one week from today, comments on this post will be open, so you can leave a permalink to your blog post for this week’s contribution. (A study in contrasts - or any other idea you had.)
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Please take a few moments to read the the about page, the code of [...]

Place in poems – who needs a GPS device when we’re grounded in detail?
Lately as I’ve been driving from one place to another I’ve started jotting down interesting town names and street signs: Tulip Lane, Sleepy Hollow Road, Famous Raymond’s Hot Boiled Peanuts, The Best Little Hair House in Georgia (a hair salon!) and the [...]

Give me some room! (For creating space in a life for writing.)
If I haven’t had my cup of poetry in the morning, I’m a real bear. Since I work in the late afternoons and early evenings, mornings are my quiet time, when I sit down to do some writing.
It’s fun to learn about the rituals different [...]

Casting call- unique types wanted!
As poets we feel the need to write, but what do we write about? We surf the net looking for prompts, read newspapers, look at paintings or listen to music, but ultimately we end up writing about ourselves. How then can we turn our own lives into poems?
If your life is [...]

Establishing a daily writing practice can turn into an adventure if you spend some time moseying around the web. Writing prompts appear on many different sites, on every day of the week, beckoning the poet to link up and share a few lines or read what others have to say. In fact, you can even [...]