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The 2014 Big Poetry Giveaway!!!

3/28/2014

It's Almost April! It's Spring! It's Almost National Poetry Month! And it's the Big Poetry Giveaway 2014!

I am a Rust Belt writer who lives in northwestern Pennsylvania. Mainly a poet, I have recently started exploring the world of prose, both fiction and literary nonfiction. I teach right across the state border at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.

I fell in love with the poetry of Erin Ganaway when I first read her work in Town Creek Poetry. Take a look here and I am sure you will love her poems as much as I do!

Ganaway's first collection of poetry, The Waiting Girl, is a lyrical journey between two worlds: the land of the Appalachian South and the coast of Cape Cod. Deeply rooted in place, Ganaway's poetry explores the interconnections between what it means to be human in landscapes that both bind us and push us away.

Winner of the Texas Review Breakthrough Prize, The Waiting Girl will not disappoint! You can read more about Erin Ganaway's work and her collection on her website.

And now for my second poetry giveaway....it's a Chapbook Grab Bag! Yes, I will include a copy of Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Winner of Main Street Rag's 2011 Chapbook Contest), but I will also be including at least nine other chapbooks, including collections by Karen Dietrich, Charles Jensen, Roy Seeger, and Joseph O. Legaspi. The winner will be guaranteed a wide range of voices and publishers!

Please leave your name and contact information below (such as an email). And if you want more information about the annual Big Poetry Giveaway, take a look at Kelli Russell Agodon's blog listed here!

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Remembering Those Pool Hall Girls

3/26/2014

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Every small town in America had them: those girls who were up to no good. They wore their clothes too tight, teased their hair too high. They hung out where they weren't supposed to, did things like smoke and drink and swear. They most certainly had sex. Even as a child, I was fascinated by those girls -- so fascinated that they appear again and again in my poems. I call them The Pool Hall Girls.

I am thinking about my Pool Hall Girls today because my review of Alexis Ivy's Romance with Small-Time Crooks appears in the latest edition of Prick of the Spindle! Take a look here.

And in case you want to know more about what I have been reading (And I have been doing a lot of reading, here. Spring has not yet come to rural Pennsylvania. It's way too cold and damp to venture outside to do yardwork), take a look at my latest poetry pick, The Rusted City by Rochelle Hurt listed under my Book Picks.

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In Like a Lion....

2/28/2014

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As I am writing this, the Northeast is again bracing for another winter storm. Yes, it does look like March is going to roar in like a lion. We had a brief, hopeful thaw a few days ago with temperatures reaching 40 degrees. This morning, however, we woke up to below zero temperatures. I certainly do hope that all my friends at AWP are enjoying better weather than this!

I am not sorry to see the last February. This past month has been a month of sick fathers, lost jobs (not mine), and bad news from friends. Obviously, all this has been distracting me, and I have barely made a dent in my to do list. Still, the past weeks have brought some good news (that I can't share quite yet -- no it's not a book) and sightings of the Snowy Owl. Western PA/New York has been one of the hotspots for the Snowy Owl irruption, and when I drive to work everyday, I keep an eye out for one of our new found feathered friends who has been hanging out by the Jamestown Audubon Center (ironically!). I also just recently finished The Thing With Feathers by Noah Strycker, which is a wonderful collection of essays that explore the similarities we have with the birds around us. (See my brief review here)

Safe travels home from AWP, everyone! And may you recover with happy memories and stacks of great reading!

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Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

2/18/2014

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Harpur Palate has posted my review of Neil Shepard's (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel. Take a look at the review, and then of course, pick up this great collection of poetry.

In case you haven't noticed, I have also posted two informal reviews on my website under Book Picks. The first one is Prairie Silence by Melanie Hoffert, a wonderful sense of place, coming of age/coming out memoir. The second book is Scrap Iron by Mark Jay Brewin Jr. Brewin's first collection of poetry is a great exploration of the working-class world of Southern New Jersey. Take a look!

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14 in 2014?

2/14/2014

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In the blogging world, I have read a lot about book clubs/reading groups/individuals aiming to read 14 books by women in 2014. My initial thought was, wow, I read a lot -- reading 14 books by women in one year should not be hard.

I keep a list of books I read, so I looked at my tallies for this year. So far, in 2014, I have read 18 books and only four have been by women. That surprised me; thus, I decided to take a look at what I read last year.

In 2013, I read 209 books. I read a lot of different kinds of books, so included in that list are novels, literary nonfiction, nature writing, memoir, poetry, and young adult books. Out of 209 books, 126 books were written by women. To break these numbers down even further, 25 of these books by women were novels, 21 were poetry collections (both chapbooks and full-length collections), and 47 were young adult novels (YA novels are my guilty pleasures). The remaining books were memoir, nature writing, and history. So yes, I read a lot of books by women.

However, what I did notice was that while I read a lot of poetry books by women, I don't read a lot of nature books (books that are comprised by individual essays about nature or book length scientific studies) by women. Since I am trying my hand at nature writing/personal essays, I am realizing that I simply need to read more women writers who are exploring this genre.

For more information about this challenge, see Kathleen Kirk's latest blog post.

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Writing with Students and Other January Adventures

1/31/2014

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I will admit it. The new year has not started off especially well. The cold that will not go away is lingering, with a cough that in spite of prescription medication is also not going away. To make matters worse, we have been engulfed in what I am calling "The Great Chill" - with temperatures barely reaching single digits. Thank goodness, we have now warmed up a bit, with temperatures in the thirties. I have been so exhausted that I have barely been able to keep up with my classes.

Still, somehow I have found a little time to write.

Years ago, I had a colleague who told us that we should try doing our writing assignments with our students. That sounds great -- but I teach five classes a semester, almost all of them writing courses of some sort. There is just no way I could keep up with all that writing (well, I could if there was no grading or lesson planning involved). Still, this semester I have decided to try to keep up with the writing assignments in my Advanced Prose class. Right now, we are working on memoir/narrative writing, and we just read some fantastic pieces by Lori Jakiela and Amanda Leskovac . My students' memoirs are due next week and I am determined to also have a piece done.

Right now I am working on an essay about fishing trips I had with my brothers and father when I was a child. Somehow, the piece is wandering a bit while I also struggle to explore the demise of the Brook Trout from Pennsylvania waters. That, of course, takes a bit of research and I am always distracted by research, so I am trying to stay on task.

I have also managed to submit to ten journals this past month. I haven't kept up on my submissions for a long time, and it felt good to get ten packets out the door. I'm hoping that at least some of these pieces will find homes soon, especially when I have received four rejection notes this past week. Apparently, editors are cleaning off their desks and cleaning out their inboxes in preparation for AWP.

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Bring on the New Semester!

1/12/2014

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Classes start tomorrow, and because of a minor health setback I had at the start of the year, I am only now adding the finishing touches to my course schedules and syllabi.

What's on the agenda for the new semester? The usual suspects; I will be teaching sections of developmental writing and writing about literature. However, I am also teaching advanced prose for the second time. This semester, I am using an anthology of essays titled Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century edited by Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford. Some of my favorite contemporary writers have pieces in this collection, including Dinty Moore, Lori Jakiela, Barbara Hurd, Phillip Lopate, and Rhett Iseman Trull. By teaching the art of the personal essay, I am hoping to actually learn more about craft and style found in the world of literary nonfiction.

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Welcome to My New Home

1/3/2014

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We have started off the new year with snow and frigid temperatures. That's the bad news. The good news is that I have received my first acceptance for a prose piece. My essay, "Compromising Chiroptophobia or Why I'm Giving Up and Learning to Love the Bat" will be published in The Nassau Review this spring in a special issue on art, nature and science. The piece explores my personal fear of bats (even though I consider myself a small town girl!) and juxtaposes this fear with the very real possibility that many of America's bat species could go extinct because of White-Nose Syndrome.

Regular readers of my old blog, The Scrapper Poet, know that I have been working seriously with prose for about six months now. After suffering through a dry spell of not writing any poetry at all, I find writing prose liberating --I'm not agonizing over line breaks and stanzas and the music of words. Instead, I'm focusing on language itself, strong concrete nouns, specific adjectives and active verbs. I've always loved research, and yes, research plays into poetry. But, in the past, I often found myself so engulfed in the research that I forgot the poem. Somehow, prose lets me incorporate research more readily and smoothly.

I have not forgotten poetry, however. Yesterday, I received contributor's copy of Poetry East. My poem "Yellowjackets" joins work by poets Michael Miller, Molly Fisk, Robert Gibb, and Jason Irwin (who blurbed my first chapbook, Stealing Dust!) I spent yesterday, cleaning out and reorganizing last year's poetry files and I even sent some submissions out. This year may be the year that I finally get my act together and finish my first full-length collection of poetry.

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The 2014 Big Poetry Giveaway!!!

Remembering Those Pool Hall Girls

In Like a Lion....

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

14 in 2014?

Writing with Students and Other January Adventures

Bring on the New Semester!

Welcome to My New Home

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