writer | teacher | artist
I wrote this poem in 2019, revised it last year, submitted it a few places with no luck, and then just kind of gave up on it. It's basically a play-by-play of the shortest day of the year in Alaska, but I think it's the longest poem I've ever written!
Continuing the tradition of last year's summary in poems, I present to you the 2021 edition. This year was actually even more difficult for me, emotionally, than 2020, but equally productive in terms of writing, apparently.
Poetry Postcard Fest is an annual event facilitated by what is now known as Cascadia Poetics Lab, which I learned about from founder Paul E. Nelson. Basically, you pay $15 to be put into a group of 30 other people around the world who have agreed to write a poem a day for a month and mail each one on a postcard. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it was, but once again, it seems my expectations exceeded reality.
I know, as a writer, it behooves me to spin a yarn on this event, but for now I'm going to be lazy and let my dad tell the story.
It’s not like I remember it, this planet. The blues and greens that painted me as a child have been replaced with browns and grays, the color of dry bones. Crouched here among these windowed walls, roofless with decay, I long for my youth. What winter could devastate me then, having known only a few silent snows, spectral with belonging?
On Feb. 16, 2021, I had an idea for a feature film. In the next 12 days, I filled out a beat sheet, note-carded every scene, digitized those notes in PowerPoint (revising all the while), researched locations, watched half a dozen movies and several interviews with famous directors and screenwriters, and wrote the first 47 pages of my movie.
Last week, I had the misfortune of receiving an "acceptance" from a fake, online literary magazine called Violet & the Bird. This experience reminded me why I haven't submitted to obscure/new/online lit mags in the past, and I thought I would share my current rules of thumb for submissions.
Paul Hostovsky’s fifteenth collection — and fifth from Main Street Rag — Deaf & Blind, is a rare find. With humor and humility, the Massachusetts author leads hearing and sighted readers through his life thus far as an American Sign Language interpreter and student, as well as the relative and friend of many Deaf and DeafBlind people, in the form of poems and stories.
To focus on the positives of 2020, I have compiled a list of poems to exemplify my writing successes this year.
All my books are on sale at redsweaterpress.com/store through Monday night, 11:59 p.m. AKST, November 30!
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 