Changing the World, a Bus Ride at a Time

For those of you interested in gender issues in language, particularly when it comes to our images of God, go to this blog post at my theology blog.  I was struck at Synod Assembly by how often we referred to God as Father.  I'm sensitized to this issue (some might say overly sensitized) as a feminist scholar, so perhaps it bothered me more than it bothered others.  My blog piece explains why we can't afford to let ourselves slip backwards in this area.

It's interesting to me to think about how much things have changed, about how much we haven't changed at all.  When I turned in this Living Lutheran blog post about rediscovering Biblical matriarchs and the female face of God, I wrote to my editor that I'd written a very different piece than I would have when I was an angry-about-the-patriarchy 19 year old. Of course, that 19 year old would be very disheartened that her 45 year old self is still having to write such articles.  She would despair.  She would say, "Why haven't we made more progress than this?"

I think of my late adolescent self frequently these days.  I would tell that woman to buck up, that the time is coming when more women than men get graduate degrees.  I would hope that she doesn't look up the ladder and see only older, white males.  I'm tired of deflecting her justified anger.

Change is coming, at a slow drip or a fast moving train.  I have these issues on the brain as we approach the 50 year anniversary of the freedom rides (first started on Mother's Day--now isn't that an interesting nugget?).   I wonder if those late adolescents of a different era realized how much they would be changing our landscape.  Maybe they shrugged and said, "Hey, it's just a bus ride.  Hey, we're just having a hamburger at a lunch counter.  We're making a point, but are we really bringing about lasting change?"

We just never know for sure, do we?  Those freedom rides (and sit ins and marches) could have gone nowhere, say, if they had happened 10 years earlier, before the television was so widespread.

There are days I feel despair over my life and wonder if I've accomplished one single thing, made inroads in any single way that will make the path easier for those who come after me.  Women like me got Ph.D.s, which must have convinced more women that it was possible to do, because we now see more of them getting advanced degrees.  Then I go on to think about how many students have come through my classrooms, thousands of them, who could have found English Composition to be the class that closed the doors of college to them--but instead, there I was, flinging the doors open, saying, "Here's how you do it."  

It's harder in these days when I'm an administrator.  Yet I remember during my graduate school days, my community college days, I didn't exactly feel like I was changing the world either.  As an administrator, I hope to make it easier for faculty to teach.  I hope to create programs/classes/events/initiatives that keep students in school.  I hope to be the friendly face that everyone needs to say when the daily going gets tough.

There are many ways to change the world, many bus rides that we might take.  We are like those medieval laborers who built the cathedrals.  Our task is not to build the whole cathedral.  Our task is to build our bit, to help the arc of history bend towards justice (as Martin Luther King would phrase it).

Justin Evans Talks about Teaching,Living in the U.S. Southwest, Writing, and More: Part 1

During National Poetry Month, I was lucky not only to be able to be one of the first to read Justin Evans' Town for Trees, but to also interview him via e-mail.  What follows is the first of a two part interview; this part focuses on Justin's unique background and on his approach to writing in general.  The second part will come to you on Friday, when he will talk more specifically about Town for Trees.  Between now and then, be sure to go here to order your very own copy.  You can read my review here and Sandy Longhorn just reviewed the book here.  Justin blogs here, where you can find all sorts of information and links. 

I've put my questions in bold type.  Justin's answers follow.

1. I'm interested in your military experience and how it's shaped you as a writer. While I know lots of writers and I know lots of military folks (like my Air Force dad), I don't know many writers with military experience.

I joined the army a year and a few months after I graduated from high school, when I was 19. I ended up training at Ft. Dix and Ft. Gordon, serving at Ft. Hood, in Germany, Desert Storm, and then Ft. Bragg. I had been trying to write poetry ever since I was fifteen or so, and I wasn't getting much better at it when I was in the army. However, what I was doing was starting to send out my work to editors. I got a lot of hate mail because I was pretentious and my poetry was simply terrible. A lot of people don't believe I got actual hate mail, because they don't want to believe editors do that sort of thing. I did get one friendly response, but for the most part, the feedback was very negative. You hear stories about how certain submission letters are placed in editorial offices to be made fun of by the staff, and I think I was simply too good a target to pass up.

I said all that to say this: The army made me disciplined, and it made me see through failure. Without that discipline, I would not have been able to stick to my goal of becoming a better poet. Without being able to see through failure, to know there is something on the other side of it, I think I would have given up on writing, or at the very least, given up on the idea that I should take seriously the act of writing and all that comes along with that assumption.


2. I know that you write poetry and that you blog. Do you write other genres? Have you ever?

Fiction eludes me. I would love to write a novel. I have the idea, the characters, basic plot, and I can even see the faces of the people in the story, but I cannot ever get past the first chapter, and the writing I do finish is flat and uninteresting. Because of all the education journals I have had to digest as part of my studies and profession, I enjoy writing the occasional satirical educational research paper, and I review books from time to time. However, for the most part, I am a one-trick pony.

3. Your graduate work was in Literacy Studies, another departure from most of the writing world, which gets an MFA or a PhD in literature. Tell us a bit about what literacy studies encompasses. Has your graduate work shaped your writing?

Literacy studies is all about the process of how people learn to read. All the way from phonemes and decoding to inference and critical thinking. I started my program because as a public school teacher, I need to perform professional development, and it also put me further along in the pay scale. It was not my first choice of study, but it was available, and it was inexpensive. I received my degree in 2004 from the University of Nevada, Reno, which is okay by me. I still snuck poetry into my Master's Project, which is what made a lot of it bearable.

My degree in Literacy studies was a different approach to writing, but it did help in tiny little insights. For example, the way native English speakers speak as toddlers is actually very similar to Anglo-Saxon, which suggests certain genetic elements of language are embedded or hard-wired into our brain. This helped me make a connection with what Richard Hugo said of his own writing in his book, The Triggering Town, on the subject of monosyllabic words and the difference of ending in consonant sounds and vowel sounds. It helped with how we form words as readers and speakers, which is always going to be of use to a writer.

4. You teach in the public school system. In what ways does this teaching enrich you? In what ways does it drain you? What would be your dream job, if you could have anything?

I'd love to give you some fancy answer for this question, but honestly, the greatest benefit for me teaching public school as a writer, is simply the fact that I get to talk about literature most every day. Other than that, it is actually a drain on my energy. Luckily for me I have plenty of other things going on which revitalize me.

5. You've published 3 chapbooks before Town for the Trees. How did your experiences with the chapbooks prepare you for this current publication?

My first chapbook was just that. I knew it was going to be a chapbook, so I made that my goal. My second book was a separate project. I wanted to do what I had done in my first book, but with the town of Springville as the central character. My third chapbook was an exercise in ars poetica. Each book had its challenges, but all three were exercises in the narrative arc. I am a huge believer in what I call the invisible narrative, a hidden story only the poet knows, which serves as the framework of the book. Constructing those books helped me to construct Town for the Trees (which is a marriage between my first two chapbooks) and my recently completed, but as of yet unaccepted second full length manuscript.

6. Have you always lived in the U.S. West? Do you want to continue to do so? Do you worry about dwindling water resources?

I have only been out of the West when I was in the military. I have no real desire to live anywhere else, but not out of any particular loyalty to the West, but because this is where my family is, where the terrain, both physical and emotional, is familiar to me.

I would say I am trying to be environmentally aware, but I am not in a part of the West where water is scarce. There is more water in the desert than people think, it's just not as easily seen as in other places.

7. What advice would you have for poets who are just beginning their careers?

First and foremost, do what I failed to do. Read every day, and by read, I mean do more than decode text. I mean actively engage with that text. Think about what you are reading. Read for at least an hour a day. If you read just one book on your own each month while you are in college, outside what your classes require, you will double your knowledge base. Read what you like. Read what you hear about. Read what someone says is good. 50 books doesn't sound like an appealing way to start, but it is the start you should be looking for. I neglected to read early on, and now I am paying for it in all sorts of ways. Read.

After you have read, read some more. You cannot be a good writer without reading. Read craft books and novels. Read comics, and read journals. Read what your friends write. Read the classics. There is a reason we still read Homer and the Pearl Poet.

8. What advice would you have for people interested in teaching?

Not very much That is a matter for which there is not much valid advice to be given at this time. It is a dangerous time to be an educator, and though I love it dearly, it is not a career to be entered into based solely upon the advice of others. The good news is that no career really is the kind to be entered into lightly.

9. Do you think today's adolescents are more self-centered than previous generations? Do they think too highly of themselves? When you look at the next generation of students whom you're teaching, what do you advice would you give the rest of us?

I just got back from an education conference, so my mind is swimming about this sort of thing right now. I think there are some unrealistic entitlement based expectations in our youth culture today, but I think they are based more in the ease of locating information. Nobody actually has to do any real research. They look it up, and instead of asking whether or not information is correct, those sites are taken at face value with no skepticism. That then translates into a certainty of knowledge. Coupled with the "My darling child is the absolute star of the universe" is unsettling to say the least. It's not universal by any means, but like any phenomenon, there are enough young people out there who are too certain in their knowledge and have no way of coping with failure when they encounter irrefutable evidence their pre-suppositions were wrong.

My advice? Help your child understand that failure is not always a bad thing. No, we do not want a generation of people who think failure is okay or the norm, or who give up, but we need to point out that failure is an essential part of growth, learning, and maturity. Being accountable has gone out of style, and I think it's time we bring sexy back.

10. If you're comfortable talking about your family, I'm sure we'd love to hear about them. Do you wrestle with work/family/creative life balance? Any secrets?

I am married and I have three boys, and I am fortunate that the more busy I am in my everyday life, the more productive I am in my creative life. That has not been absolutely true with my book being so close to coming out and now being released. My pattern is that I have to be completely finished with the various aspects of a project for me to move on and start something new. I wrote an entire manuscript at a point when I believed my current book was going nowhere. October 2008 through February 2010 was an amazingly productive time for me. It was huge.

As soon as I found a publisher for my book, my creativity went down the drain. I needed to finish that. When my book was dropped and then picked up again, my mind went into survival mode and devoted all of its energy into making the book happen. I think it will take me a couple more months of having my book out before I get back into the swing of writing again. I will begin writing new poems and getting my thoughts out there. If I am lucky enough to get my second book picked up, all of that will slow down and eventually stop until I have resolved all of the issues relating to the book.

I am lucky in that I am rarely a prolific poet, so going months at a time without writing any poetry doesn't get to me like it did when I was a younger poet, before I recognized and learned to live with my creative pattern.

Mother's Day Musings

My brain swirls with many things, but I want to bookend this post with Mother's Day musings.  So, first, a tribute to my mom.  My mom is/was a great mom in so many ways, but the one that was perhaps most important to me was that she kept me supplied in books.  Before I could drive myself to the library, she drove me and checked out as many books as I wanted (the Montgomery Alabama public library only allowed children to check out 5 books at a time--5 books??!!--I could read that amount in a lazy afternoon!).  And when our family only had one car, we biked to the library.  She was supportive in any number of my future endeavors too, like writing and drama and choosing a college and writing a dissertation and oh, the list is so long--but all those quests are rooted in my early reading.  It was those books that showed me all the possible lives that humans could have.  And it was my mom that made it possible for me to have books.

So, I've been away at my church's Synod Assembly.  The larger Lutheran church is divided into districts, or synods.  I'm part of the Florida-Bahamas  synod, although we're larger than that--we have more Lutheran churches in Haiti than in the Bahamas.  In the past, there's been computer access, so I thought I might blog a bit, and thus thinking, I decided not to announce a blog silence.

Of course, there weren't computers.  Ah well.  I'll be posting more about Synod Assembly on my theology blog tomorrow, if you're interested.

Yes, I got back from the Create in Me retreat on Monday and headed back on the road on Thursday.  It's been a whirlwind of a week, and I'm not exhausted, so much as a bit worn down and fraying at the edges--just a small unravelling, which I'll knit back together today.

I keep thinking of scenes from the road, the sign that said:  "Alien fresh jerkey," with that iconic alien head.  Was it a warning?  A sign like the "Fresh Eggs" sign beside it?  Just something that amused the owner of the property?

I saw so many bulldozed orange groves.  Of course, I only know about the missing orange groves because of my earlier memories of Interstate 95.  Many of them were bulldozed for housing projects that are only half done.  Will they be completed?  Are the people who bought early, and now have houses in the middle of nowhere, with no neighborhood, are those people happy, or were they hoping for a community?

Synod Assembly is held at an Orlando resort, which is a surreal experience in and of itself.  We meet to talk about poverty and the needs of the world and how we can minister to those needs in a Christ-like way.  We're discussing those issues in a very expensive resort.  I looked out over a golf course that was a vivid green.  That apocalypse gal side of my brain said, "This is not sustainable."  We're not like Las Vegas, which uses its scarce water resources in amazingly conserving ways (go here for a Fresh Air story on water use and how Las Vegas uses water wisely, despite the desert environs).  I have this vision of being an older woman and remembering resorts of my youth and shaking my head at the excesses and at what we embraced as a society and at what cost.

Last night, as I tossed and turned, I thought about future archaeologists and the golf courses they might uncover.  What would they think the golf course represented?  I had a vision of a whole series of poems about future archaeologists and what they uncover.  Feel free to play along!

On the way home, I listened to the amazing Bruce Springsteen CD, The Seeger Sessions.  Lots of great Depression era songs, which fit my musing mood.  I wondered what Woody Guthrie would make of this landscape of bulldozed orange groves.  I found gas for $3.74 a gallon; I don't expect to find that price again anytime soon.  As I was about to leave, a young guy asked me for gas money to make it to pay day.  I was sad that the gas station was so busy; I was tempted to buy him a whole tankful, but there was such a line behind me that I just gave the kid all the quarters that I had.

Again, I thought of Woody Guthrie.  I wondered if that kid really needed gas money or if he was just begging.  I thought about I don't usually see begging at the gas station, but it makes sense.  I thought about everyone who's working at jobs that don't pay much and how they make it from pay day to pay day.  I thought about all the Caribbean islands that aren't too far from this peninsula, and the even more extreme poverty we'd see there.

I need to get back on some sort of poetry schedule.  This promises to be a busy week.  I'm doing a reading at a wine shop on Wednesday (7p.m. at Hollywood Vine; if you're in the South Florida area, come join us!).  This week is the last week for pre-publication sales of I Stand Here Shredding Documents--have you bought your copy yet?  Go here and scroll down to order, if you haven't.

So, back to Mother's Day musings.  What?  You were hoping for a Julian of Norwich meditation?  Go to my theology blog post for a reading with which to celebrate her feast day--complete with poem inspired by her.

You were hoping for a post on the female face of God?  Perhaps even something that talks about God as our mother?  Go to my post on Living Lutheran for that one.

Of course, if you wanted the theology stuff, you might not have come to this blog in the first place.  Maybe you'd just like a Mother's Day poem.  I don't have anything that's like a traditional celebratory mom poem.  But "Necessity of Moisture" seems to fit the bill, in terms of celebrating family traditions and love of all sorts.  It first appeared in Tar River Poetry and will also be part of my forthcoming chapbook.


Necessity of Moisture

His last letter spoke of snow,
the necessity of moisture, the dryness of the soil.
Even though he had not tilled the ground
in more than twenty years, the dirt
still spoke to him. As with an old love,
his connection to the land would never completely cease.

Although she would never farm his way,
his daughter always kept a garden.
Even now, long after she’s let the grass grow
over the backyard once ruled by green
beans, squash, tomatoes, and okra, even now, she shovels
her organic waste back into her compost heap.

I will never garden on even my grandmother’s
small scale, but I save all my kitchen scraps,
mix them with grass clippings, compost
in my non-professional way. I long for her rich, black dirt
as I stick my seedlings in the Florida sand.
We chat every Sunday, exchange rainfall statistics
the way some men might discuss baseball details.
Catlike, I save weather tidbits through the week as a love offering.

Some families develop elaborate gift giving rituals,
a whole language of material love. Others create pet
names, secret personalities, languages no outsider understands.
My family’s secret language lies in the meteorological details
and soil analysis, love as moisture, compost, seedlings.

Not Letting Go of National Poetry Month: Justin Evans' Latest Book

I can't seem to let go of National Poetry Month.  I've been reading Justin Evans' latest book, Town for Trees, and while I don't have Dave Bonta's technical skills, so I won't be posting an audio podcast, I'm doing an interview with Justin via e-mail.  I'll be posting the interview in two parts next week, likely on Wednesday and Friday.

If you haven't bought a copy of Justin's latest book, go here right now and buy it.  Even before I read the poems, I fell in love with the book design:  creamy pages that are heavy, readable text, great cover photo (taken by Justin himself).  The poems are worthy of the beauty of the book design.

The poems circle around a particular town and the surrounding landscape of a place in the U.S. west.  It's not a desert landscape, as I think of it, because there are trees and rivers.  But the depictions of the landscape are so vivid that the landscape becomes almost a character itself, often upstaging the humans in the poems.  The opening poem, "In Twilight," foreshadows these intertwinings:  "Together we both migrate, one man and one river, / each of us bound to accumulate with our own kind / where we are certain to find a place to stop and sleep."

Many of us will be familiar with the human characters in these poems, the grandparents, the inhabitants of small towns.  I loved the poem "The Way It Goes," which describes small town deaths in two sections.  I loved the multi-poem sequence, "Hunting Chinese Pheasants," which talks about shotguns and the people who use/misuse them.

But I love the landscape poems even more, with the brooding mountains, the marauding rivers, the silent highways that slice through the landscapes.  I read these poems as I was cradled by the Appalachian mountains, a homeplace of sorts for me, a very different scenery than the one described here.  However, I felt like I knew those landscapes in the poems.  I thought about this fact as I read, "After remembering the Rocky Mountains Are New, Relatively Speaking."  The poem talks about the incremental nature of change in geological time:  "Each shrink inches per century, eroded / by the constant ebb and flow of rain / and the busy companionship of wind."  The poem contrasts this almost cheery version with the human attitude:  "We choose to believe that when a portion / is cut from us we can no longer be whole."

As I was reading these poems, with their almost elegaic tone that celebrates and mourns what has been lost, I thought about younger generations of poets who will come after us.  Will they write these same kind of poems?  After all, we're in a period of homogenization, when so many towns look the same, with their SuperWalMarts and chain restaurants.  Or will those chains be the very things that will be missed and mourned?

These poems ultimately offer hope and consolation.  The poem "Advice For Your Last Night on the River," offers a fine example:

"What have you got to lose?  The day will be long
and full of possibility, and you are still sleeping
while the aspen trees whisper to you,
singing to you all night your family history." 

Recipes for Poets

Deborah Ager of 32 Poems fame asks us all to share our favorite, quick recipes on May 20.  What a great idea!  I'll be sharing two recipes, both vegetarian, both quick, both great ways of getting more veggies into your body.  And both are recipes that never have people turning up their noses and saying, "Hmm.  No thanks."  One of them is kid friendly for sure, the other, perhaps not.  And until recently, both were very cheap.

I knew that the economy had shifted on some deep level this winter when I decided to make a pot roast.  The beef cost less than the potatoes.  Now, I'm a child of the 1970's, and I remember beef being a very special occasion food--not just for special occasions, but very special occasions.  To be fair, I'm probably remembering a year or two in my family's life and generalizing for the whole decade. 

But I digress.  If you'd like to add a recipe, go here for more details about what Deborah has in mind.  And hopefully, on May 20, we'll wake up to a world of quick recipes that leave us more time for writing!

Update:  Go here for the recipes.

Creativity Retreats, Writing Retreats,

Kelli has written a great post about how to have a successful writing retreat, or residency, the term that she posits might be more useful.  But what if writing is just one of the creative activities we like to do?  I've gone on all sorts of retreats, but my absolute favorite is the Create in Me retreat that I go on each year.  It's at a church camp, Lutheridge, in the mountains near Asheville.  It approaches the issue of creativity from all the angles that are important to me.

What does a day at a creativity retreat look like?  Let me stress that although there's a schedule, participants are free to do their own thing.

We often begin with yoga, tai chi, a walk, or some other kind of gentle movement  for twenty or thirty minutes.  Then there's a hearty breakfast.  I could eat breakfast for every meal.

We have a Bible study, and the focus rotates each year.  One year we're looking at God as creator, the next, Jesus as creator, the next, Holy Spirit as creator.  We also consider other elements:  muse, miracle worker, co-creator.  We approach our Bible study from a mainline Protestant angle, so if you're not a person who takes the Bible literally, you'll feel at home.  And even if you're a person who looks at the Bible as a historical document, you'll probably find some like-minded folks.

Then we have a choice of workshops, where we learn/experience an art form that might take more guidance.  This year, our workshops included batik, terrarium creating, mosaics, stained glass, drop spindle spinning, tatting, and several others.

After workshop time, it's time for lunch.  And then we spend the afternoon at drop-in stations at the large central building.  Each year, our choices are different, depending on who's coming and what they might want  to present.  This year, we had stations with fabric art, English paper piecing, magazine mosaics (which morphed into collaging), bamboo flutes, kaleidoscope making, and a few other things.

Each year, we do a community art project.  This year, we created a cross filled with broken objects, which I created a photo essay about on my theology blog.  I really enjoyed smashing crockery and dropping the pieces into a plexiglass cross.

We also do some worship creating.   We have a skeleton of a service, and we break into teams:  word, music, movement, image.  We have several hours to create those parts of the service.  It's always amazing to me how the pieces come together into an amazing service that we have at a nearby Lutheran church.  On Friday night after dinner, we have a worship service (on Saturday, a talent show).

We do this worship creating to show how we might do something similar at home.  I recently finished Mark Pierson's The Art of Curating Worship.  He would likely approve of our worship.  Growing up, I always found the worship at camp or on retreats to be so much more meaningful than the worship at my home churches.  I always wondered why worship couldn't always be the way it was at camp, and I was assured that I wouldn't like it, if I had it every week.  I beg to differ, as does Pierson.

Worship should be exactly the way it is at camp, week after week.  Since this is my creativity blog, not my theology blog, I'll leave the theology aside, and point out that one reason worship likely isn't the way that it is at camp is because it takes considerably more time.  It's easy to show up week after week to trudge through the same old liturgy, with hymn selection the only decisions to be made.  It takes a lot more time to think about worship, about the message, about the themes, about all the ways we could reinforce those themes.

It also takes a lot of creativity, and not everyone's brains work in that direction.  But I bet most congregations have those folks in the pews.  What would worship look like if poets designed the worship?  What would worship look like if we welcomed visual artists?

I've been on writing retreats, most regularly at Mepkin Abbey, and the Create in Me retreat at Lutheridge is similar, and yet so different.  I like that both of these retreats speak to a spiritual side that's often missing at non-religious retreats.  I like the chance to be by myself and to also interact with others (easier at Lutheridge than at Mepkin).  I like that the Lutheridge group is large, yet I often leave feeling like I haven't had a chance to connect.

I've been going to the Create in Me retreat since 2003.  I went to a women's retreat that year and was frustrated at how the small group discussion turned to housework and kids--didn't anyone have a creative life?  At the closing service, the camp leader mentioned the Create in Me retreat.  At first I felt sad:  "That's the retreat I should have attended!"  And then, happiness!  I realized that it hadn't happened yet.  I could still go.

I decided to be big and brave, and I went all by myself.  I met all sorts of great artists, and I've gone back ever since.  So now, the retreat also includes the joy of reunion.

I like being with a variety of artists, many of us trying a variety of art/craft forms.  We emphasize process, not the end product, so it's easy to be a beginner, to experiment, to play.  I've always liked a variety of creative activities, and it's great to be with people who encourage me to do it all, who refuse to choose.

It's also great to try things without investing in them.  For years, I wanted a pottery wheel and a kiln at my house.  Then one year, I actually sat down and worked with the wheel.  I decided the learning curve would be much too steep, and I have let that dream go.  Likewise with weaving.  I romanticized the idea of having a loom.  Once I did it, I found it both boring and annoying.  This retreat has saved me all sorts of time, energy, and money.

For the past two years, I've been the retreat coordinator, so I spend the year planning the retreat.  Last year, we experimented with a retreat to plan the retreat; before, the planners met periodically for lunch and planning..  I know that a retreat-planning retreat might sound like a joyless event, but it was great to have all those brains together for a week-end.  Our retreat this year was one of the best ever, and I think it's because we had an intense week-end of planning and visioning.

I am not opposed to secular retreats.  I'd be happy to experience a residency at Bread Loaf or Sewanee.  I've gone to plenty of academic conferences that make me happy.  But I'm happy and inspired by the increasing number of conferences and retreats that look at the intersections of faith, art, spirituality, and creativity.  For too many years (centuries, really), artists have had to make uncomfortable choices if they wanted to remain within religious traditions.  Some of us still do.  I'm lucky to be a Lutheran, a tradition that's almost always been comfortable with intellectual approaches and almost always been cool with artistic approaches to faith (particularly if it involves music).

And now for the hard part, the return from the literal and metaphorical mountain, the attempt to hang onto retreat mind even as daily life takes over.  It's easy to feel spiritual at a mountain top church camp.  It's easy to remember God there.  It's easy to be creative at a retreat where all the supplies are spread out enticingly and there's enough space to leave them out.  It's easy to be creative when we're all being creative together.  I'm lucky to be working in an environment that honors our creative impulses, yet there are still tasks that must be done that aren't exactly mountain-top experiences (e-mail management, document shredding, scheduling, planning, emergency/crisis/problem solving).  How to approach those tasks with my retreat self, not my frazzled self--now there's the life's task!

Back from the Mountain to Choose Book Winners

I am back from the Create in Me retreat that I go to every year, where we have fun creating together and we talk about the intersections of Faith, Spirituality (the Christian/Lutherany variety), Creativity, and Art.  I'll put together a post soon.

So, I'm feeling a bit scattered today.  I'm always feeling a bit like I left a leg or an eye or some essential Kristin-ness behind when I return from retreat (or just generally, whenever I return from travel), but this year, it's worse.  I drove up with tales of horrifying tornado weather and death coming from the radio, and this morning, I turn on Morning Edition to hear:  "Osama bin Laden is dead."  I forgot that he was human, just like the rest of us.  I feel discombobulated.

In fact, had not other people been posting their book give-away results, I might have forgotten completely.  So, without further ado, here are the winners, and I'll be getting in touch with each of them by e-mail:

Frontier Literature by Shefali Choksi goes to Jessica Goodfellow

Whistling Past the Graveyard by me goes to Valerie.

Are you sad that you're not getting my book?  It's not too late!  We are in the last two weeks of the pre-order period for my forthcoming book over at Finishing Line Press.  Go here to buy a copy.  The press decides how many copies to print by how many copies are sold during this time, so if you were ever going to buy a book, buying now helps me more than buying later.

And if you were really hoping for my first book, I'll be happy to sell you a copy for a low, low price.

In this time period where storms blow through and kill staggering amounts of people, or when terrorists get a taste of their own treatment, it's more essential than ever to return to what matters.  For some of us, it's poetry.  For others of us, it's fabric and fiber arts.  Maybe it's cooking.  Maybe it's gathering our loved ones close on a regular basis.

I will spend some time today and tomorrow getting re-centered, collecting all my vital parts back here with me.  It's time to get back to poetry writing!  But maybe for one or two more days, I'll nestle into poetry reading as I wait for myself to catch up with myself.