The address is the same but the location has changed. Come on over.

I didn’t know Sheila Squillante when she contacted me less than a month ago, “out of the Facebook abyss”, as she remarked, to pick my brain about possibilities for a virtual release party for her chapbook, A Woman Traces the Shoreline. It is a prose poem sequence, I learned, soon to be released by Dancing Girl Press, the same press that published my chapbook of ekphrastic poems on Modigliani, (al)most delicious.

Turns out DGP editor Kristy Bowen suggested she get in touch with me. So, strangers? Yes. Not even Facebook friends, not yet. But… just the tone of her note to me was exceedingly warm and friendly — but not saccharine, not overly familiar. We had exchanged a few messages, so I sent a friend request. Then, another message popped up in my inbox, addressed to multiple poets & editors, with one simple request: “Might I write something on your blog? Answer the burning questions you didn’t even know you had about my poetry? Appear in person to read poems for you? Would you like to review [my chapbook]? Do you know anyone who would? Can I cook you a meal to say thanks? I would be happy to, you know.”

Wow. Cook me a meal? My immediate response was to want to help this woman, but I didn’t respond right away. My schedule has been pretty full lately, especially the last few weeks, working on compiling and doing the layout for the 2011 Writing From Inlandia anthology, managing some of the blah administrative tasks for the journals I edit, prepping for the workshop I’m teaching, and, most recently, minding sick children this week. But even amidst all of this, my thoughts kept swinging back to her, and so I sent her another note, asking her to tell me a little about herself, and to send me some of her work.

It was nothing short of mind-blowing. In the excerpt that she sent, Squillante packs in themes ranging from the complexity of women’s roles and bodies, literary theory including Bahktin, who I became familiar with while studying the various movements feeding into the Gurlesque, the body as L’objet, the body as a site of horror as well as well revelation, without ever sacrificing the interiority and domesticity of the speaker’s narrative.

When Squillante described her work to me as being “…filled with ambivalence and terror and grapples with the way the female body (particularly the pregnant female body) gets commodified. It has to do with boundaries and ownership, I guess.” , she didn’t know that these themes — of motherhood, of women’s bodies, of the body as an object, the complexity of women’s roles, of domesticity, are all at the heart of my own writing, my heart of hearts.

Sometimes the universe, or a clever editor, or luck, or whatever, connects the dots.

Going back through my notes, the first one she sent just happened to be on my oldest son, Jacob’s, birthday. Squillante’s chapbook, A Woman Traces the Shoreline, was written while she was very pregnant with her first child, also a son. So, from one mother to another, one poet to another, I enthusiastically await the release of her chapbook, and hope that — after this sampling — you will, too.

~

*

I stare at my belly and he reads Bahktin. I read about amniotomies and they become potatoes thrown by aliens in my dreams. I’m gonna get you! I dream of old loves, of bears, of circumcision. I dream of women, of my own taut skin. I read around in books. I coexist. I am becoming, they tell me, “wholer.”

*

Half terrified, I trace the edges of a heat rash like a shoreline from shoulder to fingertips. I only want to read poems by women, I say. This one has me thinking about the notion of hero. Where is my quest narrative? someone asked.

*

I want to include too much—all the women who write poems, for instance, and birds, les globes terrestive on the shelf with the travel books—un outil de reference pour tout la famille—

*

A woman with a stepstool steps in, repositions items on a rack, moves off. A woman in her comfy clothes off until Friday from her job in the shoe department. The coffee shop. The retail bind. A woman covered in cookie crumbs—belly and breasts. A woman billowing, blue rayon and flowers. A woman in the parking lot by the dumpster, her arms airplaning. Open wide! A woman with her small red boy, back to you, a “travel pictorial.” A woman checking her messages, suggesting seaside villas, good places to see. A woman terrifying herself with the notion of inclusion. She waits, tracing the shoreline of her body, a heat rash of expectation.

*

Shirt pulled taut. Skirt pushed softly outward. L’objet. Stranger hands query and quest. Touchez le surface. When. When. When.

If anyone has been a.) looking for a creative writing workshop to attend in the I.E., b.) knows someone who is or might be interested, or C.) has been wanting to work with me personally, please keep reading.

Beginning exactly one week from tomorrow (Wednesday September 28, 2011, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm) I will be leading a brand-new FREE Inlandia Creative Writers Workshop at the Ovitt Family Community Library in Ontario, California.

It will take place every other Wednesday through the middle of November (5 sessions). The venue is a really beautiful, newly-renovated library with a cafe on the first floor and lots of parking. Registration is required because space is limited, but there is no charge for the workshop. Just bring something to write on and write with and an open mind. All genres & all experience levels welcome. My main goal is to get us writing, and writing well.

Because this is the first in what I hope will be a long-running series of workshops (the one in Riverside has been going for years) and because there are typically three sessions per year (Fall, Winter and Spring) I am starting with some basics and hoping to build a strong core group of participants who will generate some new work, pick up some strategies for revision and getting around writer’s block, and then return for Winter and Spring and beyond to develop those works into something they’d be proud of publishing.

This Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops culminate in the production of an anthology and a public reading. This year’s reading & anthology launch will be held on November 13th at Back to the Grind in Riverside at 2 pm. Participants from all three established workshops (Riverside, Palm Springs and Idyllwild; Ontario will be included next year) will be reading their finished works and copies of the anthology will be available.

If you’re interested in joining my workshop please send an email to

Inlandia@inlandiainstitute.org

with the following information:

Full name
Full street address
Telephone numbers
email address

If you have any questions, just ask!

P.S. Please forward to anyone who might interested!

… was a HUGE success. Thanks to everyone who came out, and especially to our readers — Gayle Brandeis, Mike Cluff, Sheela Free, Hillary Gravendyk (pictured above, though you can barely see the top of her head above the crowd — she is seated beside the podium), Myra Dutton, Stephanie Barbe Hammer, Liz Gonzalez, E.J. Jones, Rachelle Cruz, Kate Anger, Jean Waggoner, Maureen Foley, Lucia Galloway, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Ruth Nolan, & Cindy Rinne — and Inlandia staff Pamela Atkinson, Jeff Kraus, and Mike Sleboda. Couldn’t have done it without you! (More photos to come — will post when the gallery is up.)

I did not want a store-bought cake this year. I wanted to bake it myself. I used the stand mixer from the forties that I inherited from my grandmother last summer to bake her chocolate cake in her cake pans, using her measuring spoons and measuring cups and in that way foil any possibility of my screwing it up. And you know what? I still screwed it up, couldn’t get the damned thing out of the pan. So I plopped it all on a plate, poured the frosting over it, and stuck the candles in.

And guess what?

It was the best damned delicious cake I have ever eaten.

April was chock-full of poetry events.  I helped judge the Corona Public Library’s Teen Poetry Slam again, as I seem to always do in April and October; we had 38 kids this time, a truly big turnout for this event. Also, yesterday I launched the second issue of Inlandia: A Literary Journey. I have also been helping to facilitate and judge another poetry contest for teens that is a joint project of both the Inlandia Institute and the Rotary International; we have just finished the first round of judging and will move on to the oral presentation portion in the next couple of weeks. The great thing is that these kids will earn some scholarship money by writing poems. I introduced in Claremont one week then hosted the next two back-to-back readings by poetry pal Judy Kronenfeld, then also went to listen to another of poetry pal, Maureen Alsop, also in Claremont. So many things going on in April that I didn’t get to make it to everything I would have liked, but that’s how it goes.

But the REALLY good news is that now that April is over I get to pick winners for the Great Big Poetry Book Giveaway!

So, using the random number generator, here are the winners:

Of one of my books (choice of either Seven Floors Up or (al)most delicious):

• Comment number 3, Jo T.!

Of Matthea Harvey’s Sad Little Breathing Machine:

• Comment number 16, Carol Berg!

Jo T. and Carol — if you see this before I have chance to send you an email, feel free to drop me a note with your snail mail addy so I can get those books to you asap!

And a HUGE thanks to everyone who commented and threw their hat into the ring. I am looking forward to taking a breather this week after a very hectic but productive April. Who knows, maybe I’ll even set aside a little time to revise some of those NaPoWriMo poems.

My poetry group meets tonight, something I always look forward to. Wine & poetry! Hurray!

Lavina and I have been challenging each other to write, coming up with our own prompts. We’ve only done it twice now: The first was a sonnet challenge, and this second one was a little more fluid, only needing to incorporate a color, a tree, and a verb implying movement. I’ve been dying to write, although I’m still generally swamped and haven’t really felt I could spare the time.

Here’s the new, unrevised, as-yet-untitled draft:

I awoke this morning to a crashing pain:
A heart as yellow as a sunflower pinned to my chest.
Each petal a spoke on a wheel, yearning.
I pulled the brake and it bled sullen birds.

Your hands hold the birds like my breath.
The oak lay in a thousand pieces at our feet.
Rays of sky pummel down like buckshot
as the leaves turn upon themselves like lace misgivings.

You cannot gift the horse. I cannot tell you not to.
Tectonics could drift, my own beneath yours.
There are no assurances. The weather hoards
a whole continent of consonants.

I have all the vowels.
Yet, still there is only this pathetic flower.

Today I have actually written a poem on time. Yes, I am procrastinating on other things. Let’s blame that on the headache I woke up with, and not on the fact that I don’t really feel like beginning certain things this afternoon. It’ll all balance out in the long run.

Speaking of balance, here is my poem for the day. Robert Brewer suggested we write a “profile” poem. Yes, I am taking this in a slightly different direction than he intended.

***

Though I Must Say She Has Incredible Balance

She moves through the world always sideways, sidles through
one locale into another, approaching nothing
head-on. The mirrors present only her best side.

Her shoe-soles wear out along the right edge, the left,
never in the ball or heel like her mother’s.
She has always known she was special. Never

was she told to walk in a particular manner.
Instead, her parents encouraged her to find
her own way in the world. She has never known what

it feels like to have the sun squinch her eyes shut,
has never known the meaning of front door and back:
To her, they are all side doors. There are advantages

to this, though she cannot know for certain exactly
what they are. Sometimes she does find it confusing
to carry a glass of water. Always it winds up

both half-empty, and half-full.

***

Day 10: Yes & No

Never again will I not say, “No broccoli!”
Never again will I not scream “Pickles!” out my front door.
Never again will I not climb the mulberry tree in frilly purple drawers.
Never again will I not wear your best flannel shirt to my Great Aunt’s funeral.

Never again will I not not swear to open the bottle neck first.
Never again will I not not promise to imbibe in your vile attributes.
Never again will I not not beam the scotty up when the scotty asks me to.
Never again will I not not walk the dog, not that old yo-yo, that old cog.

Never again will I eat without first asking twice for your opinion.
Never again will I fall from the chariot while you are running behind.
Never again will I fail to inform the nearest authority if you should arrive.
Never again will I never again will I never. Again.

Day 11: Maybe You Are the Prisoner and I Am the Captor

Or maybe you are the prisoner and I am the caption, or the caps lock.
Or maybe you are the frisson and I am the captain, or the cap’n crunch.
Or maybe you are the fissure and I am the fracture, or the impaction.

O perhaps you are you are you are. O perhaps you are.

Or perhaps you are not the pudding-stealer after all.
Or perhaps you are the apple peeler, the core, or the feeler
of the ant that likes the trail I am leaving.
Or perhaps you are the butter, or the father, or the feather
on the stone, having fallen from the white-cold cloud
of feathers that exploded overhead
during that last storm.

Or perhaps you are not following me.
Or perchance you are?
O, per chance: you are.

Day 12: Zero Hour

a
blue
canary
doesn’t
eat
frogs’
gullets,
hogs’
intestines,
jackrabbits’
kidneys,
lambs’
meaty
nibblets,
or
porcupines’
quills;
regardless,
sometimes
tomorrow’s
unlikely
vicissitudes
warrant
xenogeneic
yearnings.

Day 13: When the Glue Dries

There is a ghost that eats the soup at my table.
He doesn’t dare stand or the soup may stain my chairs.
Somehow the bowl never grows shallow, the soup never colder
than it is right now. Dip your pinky in the broth and see
that it is no colder than I am. And I am no ghost.

There is a ghost that sings in the shower beneath the hail
that drives through him like tiny spears that leave
no holes, that drill the enamel from the tub
as he sings along with the water heater
humming in the distance.

There is a ghost that sleeps on my couch, that lays
his feet across my lap while I read, that sprawls the length
and doesn’t move when I want to sit down.

There is a ghost that cries that there is no ghost, that wets
the sleeves of my sweater with his tears
every time I tell him that he is not here.

Day 14: God on an Off-Day

One cat is coiled tightly into the belly of another
like lovers spooning, her belly bulging with kittens
or, possibly, singular: kitten. (But in either case
unlikely to thrive.) They do not mind. Their minds
are on the sleep they share, and the failed wind’s
attempts to dislodge them from their spot against
the fence. Mated, they love like the day will never
end, like night is not hovering like some small storm
encroaching overhead. Even when she aches,
she is his queen, yet I — I am the one who could
take her from him, or him from her, should take
care to prevent the travesty of each failed labor,
kittenish bones loitering behind each bush.
But still I let them carry their own pale lives, watch
her labor again and again, watch her relocate their litter
first beneath one bush, to beneath another, & another,
hoping against hope that, mercifully, none of them survive.

First, it’s Poem In Your Pocket Day! What are you carrying? I am carrying around Matthea Harvey’s “Shiver & You Have Weather”. Here it is:

By Matthea Harvey