This week's off to a great start at WVFC, with two writers I admire (as word-crafters and people) taking the stage.

Dad tipped me off to the launch of Kathleen O'Brien's blog about her diagnosis of breast cancer, "We'll Know More On Monday."
And I asked her to cross-post to WVFC.

I've been reading her column in the paper for years. And.... she ( Read more... )

• Today's Poetry Friday from WVFC is gorgeous. Go! Read it.


• Somehow, I wound up starting a romance-writing contest against my friend Gomez, who I've known since we were in high school. 50,000 words, bodice-ripper traditional romance. 6 months, starting May 1. Neither of us has ever written in the genre before. (Leave plot suggestions in the ( Read more... )

ChrisL writes about James Tiptree for Women's Voices For Change.
"But wait," you say.  "James?"  Isn't that a man's name...?"

Why yes, yes it is.  And that's the interesting part.  Check it out.

Makes me want to read the bio Chris mentions.

So many of the writers I know are night people or insomniacs.  Maybe someday some scientific study will show that the brain is wired so that "writes well" is actually inversely proportional to "sleeps well" but that's not the point.   I went to bed at a decent hour for once, turned light off at a decent hour, and then had an excellent essay write ( Read more... )

Last night, class covered kinds of meter:
Syllabics (patterns of syllables) and Sapphic Stanzas.

Sapphic Stanzas are tricky.  The meter has to work a certain way- winds up not instinctive to those who don't know Greek.  So in class we worked on the Adonic, the shorter last line, which has a pattern of stresses and unstressed syllables, sort of like ( Read more... )

Overall, the class is older than I expected.  Not recent-student types, more like professionals who want to add poetry into their lives.  We did not have so much conversation about what people did for a living, so jury's still out.  I like the fact that the instructor got down to business, and there was a lot of reading and writing and talking ( Read more... )

Well, my January's off to somewhat of a fruitful start ( Read more... )

I've already had a poem accepted for publication, in an online journal called The Verse Marauder (yes, I found it online, and totally submitted just because of the name. Why do you ask ( Read more... )

Given the fact that I have had a very lazy day, including but not limited to an inadvertent nap on the couch from about 8pm to midnight, I have been wide awake for the past two hours ( Read more... )

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