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.
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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