A Little Light, a Tree & a Breeze
Day after day, day after still day,The summer has begun to pass away... -from Summer's Elegy, by Howard Nemerov I can't be sure, but I think we've come to the part of the summer where we're tilting a little too heavily toward the fall. You can almost see September if...
Keep Coming Back
And so, after a couple of fairly unproductive days of writing - or - not writing - as the case was – days where I’d meant well, had made a little nest on the couch, surrounding myself with not only a pile of bills, but a list of writing assignments and essays I’d...
Suzy Was Here
“Come on Gal! Hit the ball! God dammit!” This is the sound of my 77-year-old Mother shouting at herself during her tennis lesson this morning. “No! No! No!” she screams as she slams the racquet into the ball. “Move it!” she shouts,...
Does This Blog Post Make Me Look Fat?
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." - Agnes De Mille If...
Poetry Saves the Day * Meet Alison Luterman
25 years ago I was introduced to a world of poets who would change everything I thought I knew about poetry - which wasn't much. I didn't have a traditional education - grew up in hippy alternative schools in Los Angeles - didn't read the classics, not even in...
The Challenge of Writing True Stories
When my friend + long time student, Lisa Sadikman asked me if I wanted to participate in a blog hop where writers get a chance to write about their writing process I said sure, then immediately regretted it because I had just promised myself that I wouldn’t say yes to...
Why You Should Pick Me
Mostly we use poetry to inspire and jump start our Wild Writing classes over here at 27 Powers, but the other day I came across a letter my then 10-year-old Zoe wrote to her friends at school telling them why they should vote for her for student council. It captured...
The Trouble with Words
A writer friend and I were walking recently and discussing the challenge of writing about deeply personal experiences. We agreed that writing about the important events or people in our lives was a way to unpack and understand them better. That was good. On the other...
Tell the Truth As You Understand It
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being...
Telling True Stories
One of the best things about staying with your work for a very long time is that you have a chance to understand, year after year, what exactly you’re doing. Not even because you’re trying to do it better, but because each year your work reveals itself even more to...