Novembery

It’s a beautiful sunny day but I feel the cold coming through my bedroom window… my feet are the canaries in the coal mine.. I know I’m going to turn into an anna-shaped block of ice from the feet up if I sit here long enough. Thankfully I bought some knitted slippers from a vendor at the Mental Health Festival of Hope, just have to find them.

I spent all day Tuesday writing a story for the CBC short story contest. It’s the first time I’ve entered and I found it really motivating to be writing it on the very day it was due. Not likely the way to write a winning story but there you are. The women at the poetry group I belong to tolerantly agreed to give me a critique at the 11th hour and it was very helpful! Thanks, poetry girls!

I don’t always feel I need a critique, but I probably always need one more than I know. Usually, I’m pretty certain whether a poem is good or not, finished or not. But fiction is a different matter. Somehow I just don’t have the radar for it.

My hope is that this blog will look and sound better very soon! Please don’t give up on me… and feel free to critique! I’m a big girl, I can take it.

writing and stuff

It’s a good day- a beautiful sunny Monday here in Dartmouth. Not a blogging day. More of a jogging or logging sort of day, neither of which I have  the energy to even contemplate. 

Last week, a group of four poets read their work at the Fables Club in Tatamagouche. Annette, the owner was abuzz, taking drink orders, and the place was packed.  Zach Wells, Carole Langile and Harry Thurston, had no trouble following my act…   they were brilliant. Zach’s poetry is word-licious, Carole’s thoughtful and aching by times, and Harry’s had the heart honking like a goose.  I guess the novice always goes first, but I was glad because I was more nervous than I’ve been in a long while, and I was able to listen to the other poets fully.

There’s an interview with me in Atlantic Books Today about my writing residency in the Czech Republic.  I guess I’m really going to have to finish my second novel, since eveyone knows I’m working on one now! Thanks ABT and Michelle Brunet, who interviewed me!

I still haven’t figured this blog thing out, or I should say, what I want this blog to be about. Writing and stuff, for sure. Maybe food, and maybe Baha’i stuff.  If there’s anything you’d like me to write about, let me know and I’ll consider it!

All the words you want

My website is changing… evolving… transforming!  from a little, hairy, yellow and black caterpillar into, um, a little yellow and black butterfly.  Soon, I hope, it will be unrecognizable. But it will still have my face. Yes, my face with antennae and 36 eyes or whatever. It will still be mine, and I hope you’ll stick around to witness the rebirth, and that you won’t stomp on me with your big human feet.