Hurry, hurry, don't delay! This is your last chance to win Dixmont, by Rick Campbell.
To win this book, simply add your name to the comment section here.
The lucky winner will be drawn at random and announced on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 (that's tomorrow!).
Have you paid it forward? There are many reasons to dislike Facebook (which I recounted here) but Creative Pay It Forward, which first appeared on Facebook, temporarily suspends my disdain:
Creative Pay It Forward
I promise to send something handmade to the first five people who respond to this post. They must, in turn, promise to post this and send something they made to the first five responders. It must be handmade by you, and it must be sent to your five people sometime in 2011.
I answered the call, and just completed my handmade gifts. I love the concept, and appreciate the artful twist. The gift possibilities are many: cookies, poems, letters, paintings, drawings, photos . . . Something big, something small, something made with hands & heart.
Need a bit of inspiration? Check out Art, a delightful short film directed by Andrea Dorfman, with song by Tanya Davis.
. . . Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them . . .
— from Valentine for Ernest Mann
by Naomi Shihab Nye
On this Thankful Thursday, a burst of springlike sunshine is warming the cockles of my heart. Yes, cockles.
In a fit of faith, I broke out the warm-weather wardrobe, which on the chilly Oregon Coast means shoes without socks. I'm thankful for these shoes (a bargain snagged last spring), the weather that allows them, and the poet Naomi Shihab Nye who finds poems in all places.
Because appreciation increases joy, it's Thankful Thursday. Joy expands and contracts in direct relation to our sense of gratitude. Tell me, what makes your world expand?
Because a few direct questions can lead to endless insight, I'm happy to present Fast Five — short interviews with my favorite writers, and chances to win great books. 
You can win a free copy of Dixmont by Rick Campbell. Simply post your name in the comment section below by Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011. The winner will be announced the following day. 
Rick Campbell is the director of Anhinga Press, teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida, and helps to run Other Words, an annual writing conference held at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. He's written four poetry books: Dixmont, The Traveler’s Companion, Setting The World In Order, and A Day’s Work. He’s won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and two fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Born in Pittsburgh, he now lives in Gadsden County, Florida, with his wife and daughter.
You make good friends in the strangest places. Rick and I met at a high school reunion in which our spouses were reliving their adolescence. Desperate for conversation that traveled beyond the 1970s, Rick and I found common ground in poetry. Since then, we've enjoyed an ongoing conversation about writing, publishing and poems.
We often talk about the music of poetry. Please, tell me, what makes a poem work?
For me, for most I guess, there are a lot of things that make the poem work. Music — whether it’s rhythm, a more traditional idea of beat or meter, or maybe some larger sense of sound, as in composing a song, a symphony maybe — it’s hard for me to define “music” in a poem. It’s like that saying I know it when I hear it. But music isn’t all that’s important; I think a poem needs to make a statement. It needs to say something about the world we live in. It has to tell us, maybe not a truth, but some sort of revelation. When I read a poem I want to say “yes,” that’s how it is, and it’s even better if the poem reveals something to me that I did not know, or that I had not seen before in the way it’s revealed to me. If a poem is going to work, then lots of things, maybe everything has to work. And, for me, not many poems really “work.”
You are an accomplished poet, professor and publisher. What do you know now that you didn't know when you were first writing poems?
In the beginning, when I was 25, I didn’t know anything about poetry. I wanted to write songs. It took me a long time to become even a pretty good poet. I could see what was good in what I was reading, and I read a lot of poetry, maybe 15 or 20 books a week in those first few years. But that does not answer the question. I guess the most important thing that I have learned is to trust the words, to let them come out and then see what happens. In the beginning I tried to force the words into the idea of the poem. Now I know that the words create the poem and the ideas.
Some people say "first thought best thought." Others edit a poem into place. What is your writing process?
I usually write the entire poem during the first draft. Then, if the poem seems worth it, worth hanging on to, I edit and rewrite it until it seems finished. There’s a poem in Setting the World in Order, “The Poem in the River” that I started in 1978 and finished in 1996. I worked on it in three different towns over 2000 miles apart. That’s pretty extreme, but I write and I rewrite. I think it’s sort of combination of first though best thought and think and think again. That phrase is a pretty dangerous thing for a teacher for a teacher to tell a young student. Beginning poets need to work poems for a long time, and take a careful look at each word, each step of the poem’s composition.
Finish this sentence: If not a poet, I'd be . . .
a centerfielder, an itinerant fisherman? I don’t know what I would I have been. I’m not sure I would even have gone to college if I didn’t want to write. I didn’t start college until I was 25; my first major was in anthropology, but I don’t know what it would be like to be one. And I was never good enough to play pro baseball, so I would have starved as a centerfielder.
What is your favorite poem in Dixmont, and why?
Tough one. But I think it’s Intelligent Design and the Click Beetle.
. . . The beetle clicks, leaps, falls, assesses its heads
or tails state, then either crawls off somewhere
or begins again. If grand design
were measured by a success ratio, wouldn't
a simple rollover mechanism be a better idea?
The universe is full of little jokes and games
of chance. I had only a minute chance of getting
throat cancer and I got it. Then I had a 90% chance
of being cured, and maybe I am. The
odds were so slim that the drunk
who hit my wife's car that afternoon
on a lonely country road
would be speeding east as she drove west
on a blue May day . . .
I like the way it moves, how it gets so many things into one poem. I hope everything in it works. When I was first trying to write poems I was often told that I had too many things in one poem. I probably did back then, but I also believed that if I could do it right, then I could make a lot of things hang together and get the poem to leap and then land with grace. I think that poem does it, and that’s why I like it best. In truth though, the poem I like best is always the one I just wrote.
Bonus Question: I'm a word collector. What are your favorite words?
I like provenance, epiphany, redemption, but I don’t know if I have a favorite. A friend and I counted how many times river appears in Setting the World in Order and it was like 33 times or something, but I love rivers far more than the word river. I like “B Flat,” but only when I’m playing that harp.
To win Dixmont by Rick Campbell, simply add your name in the comment section below by Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011. Feeling shy? Email me: dcm@drewmyron.com
Your name will be entered in a random drawing. The winner will be announced on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011.
And the winner is . . . Fred!
Thanks to all who read, wrote & played.
I know that thank you notes are an obligatory after-Christmas chore but I still love them — both writing and receiving.
Jackie has complicated peroxide hair and she dresses like something out of a Tom Waits diner; that day she was wearing white pedal pushers and a red polka-dot top with ruffles in bewildering places.
— from Faithful Place, by Tana French
I don't know how I found this book. One day it was at the top of my stack. I didn't recognize the author or the title. The novel is a mystery, written by a woman in the voice of a man. It's set in Dublin, and it's 400 pages long. Nothing about this book said pick me.
I was resistant, but by page 20, at the Tom Waits reference, I was committed. A few chapters later, I was feeling a familiar and pleasant conundrum: I was eager to keep reading but didn't want the book to end.
What are you reading? Anything unexpected?
Because appreciation increases joy,
it's Thankful Thursday.
What are you thankful for today? A person, a place, a thing? A story, a song, a poem? I've found the more I appreciate, the more I see to appreciate. Joy expands and contracts in direct relation to our sense of gratitude. Tell me, what makes your world expand?
• • •
We are smack in the certainty of winter, and my world is feeling damp, abandoned, cold and cruel.
Thankfully — yes, there is an upside to this dreary disposition — I have learned how to roast a chicken. I'm no gourmet. I like food and love eating but I have no patience for complicated cooking. And I'm frugal to boot. Thank goodness for easy, affordable, delicious roast chicken. After a robust search, I now use this simple recipe. Today, the kitchen is warm and my heart is thawing, and all because of an edible bird.
On this Thankful Thursday, I am grateful for poultry.
West Side Books in Denver, Colorado
Some people remember their first kiss. I remember my first bookstore.
I was just eight. Down the street and around the corner was a house turned into a children's bookstore where I spent days nestled in cozy corners, exploring the Five Little Peppers, Little House on the Prairie and more.
Does anything press more on the memory than books? Not for me.
Since my early bookshop experience, whenever I visit a town or move to a new city, I seek first books. Not restaurants. Not even coffeeshops. First things first: I want to know a town has a center, a literary core.
When I moved to Seattle, young and broke, I was grateful for the Seattle Public Library. I loved this place, even before the fabulous renovation which came years after my departure. In those Seattle stacks I found Pablo Neruda.
In Denver, where I grew up, Tattered Cover is the legendary forerunner of independent bookstores. And in Portland, Oregon, where I was born, Powell's Books fills an entire city block. I've been lucky to know and love these models of literary independence.
But even more, I'm thrilled to find small book shops, places with little fanfare but lots of heart. When lost and wandering in what seemed a dry desert, these bookstores quenched my literary thirst:
Chickering Bookstore - Laramie, Wyoming
You've been to Laramie, right? It's an austere landscape (which, admittedly, I came to love) with large, open spaces and howling wind. Big sky but few books. Chickering was an oasis, lush, fertile and welcoming.
West Side Books - Denver, Colorado
Located in what is now Denver's hip Highland neighborhood, West Side Books was old-school cool long before it was surrounded by swank boutiques and cafes. Just like my favorite, worn-soft jeans, even with relocations and expansions the book shop has retained the comforts and charms of age. And, thanks to owner Lois Harvey (bless her trusting heart) West Side Books was where I first read my poems aloud and in public.
Paragraphs on Padre Boulevard - South Padre Island, Texas
My nightmare? A vacation of sun and laze and I have run out of books. It's happened. More than once I have trawled the grocery store selection, thumbing through B-list bodice rippers, desperate to find something to read. Thank goodness for Paragraphs, the only bookstore on Texas' South Padre Island. Crisp and clean, at just two years old, they've got new books, comfy chairs and a roster of readings.
Mari's Books and . . . - Yachats, Oregon
As evidenced by the shop name, owners Mary, Mari and Jeanine are open to possibilities. Located in downtown Yachats — an oxymoron in this remote coastal town (and my home) of just 600 full-time residents — Mari's sells gently used books, which means it's best to arrive not with a shopping list but with an open mind. Just the other day, for example, I popped in to say hello, and popped out with a handful of books I had never heard of or intended to purchase. In my book — pun intended — that's the best kind of impulse buy!
How about you — Where are you shopping? What shop marks your memory?
We have to earn silence,
then, to work for it:
to make it not an absence
but a presence,
not emptiness
but repletion.
— Pico Iyer
This is a Gratitude Rock.
Every year, Sara sends us homemade Christmas cards and gifts. One year a miniature totem pole. Another year a three-dimensional, wood Christmas tree. A pickle-in-a-jar ornament. A handmade coffee table. And my all-time favorite: my very own, in-house mailbox!
This year she sent a triangle of green cloth, with this message:
Every time you touch or see your gratitude rock, you are supposed to think of anything in life that you are thankful for. I now keep one in my pocket, using it to think of my good life, nice home, wonderful dog, loving friends & family, and a great job with inspiring students [Sara is a teacher]. I generally touch it at least twice a day . . . being ever so grateful that I do have so many things to be thankful for.
I love this gift, and I especially like that Sara sewed the rock into a pouch, creating a gift of the rock, and a gift of gratitude, too.
We hung the green triangle, still sewn shut, on the Christmas tree. Yesterday, as we packed away the holiday decor, I snipped the stitches and found the precious stone inside.
Thank you Sara, for making thankfulness touchable, solid, simple and real.
In these tender first days of a fresh year, I offer no resolutions, declarations or dictates. Just this poem, stored as reminder for the days ahead.
Your mind is a muscle
Stop your thoughts.
Replace chatter with stillness.
Make choices.
Happiness is available.
Some days it takes so little to amuse me.
It's rarely the I-won-the-lottery! stuff that gives me the grins. Instead, it's the silly, trivial things that float through and dust the day with easy appreciation. On this Thankful Thursday, I'm grateful for all the loopy, goofy things that make me grin:
Men in food suits.
On this one, I'm easy to please. Something inexplicable cracks me up about men dressed as food. This look delivers my favorite kind of smile — the one that makes no sense but feels so good.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. The children's book was published in 1961 and I'm reading it now for the first time. It's a modern fairy tale packed with word play and puns, and travels to the town of Distortion, the Island of Conclusion, and the Kingdom of Wisdom. This book is a charmer!
These words:
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places and things. What are you thankful for today? What makes you smile?
Earlier this year, Spirit First put out a call for poems on the themes of meditation, mindfulness, silence, stillness and solitude. With this simple gesture, the nonprofit organization kicked off their first annual poetry contest.
Response was overwhelming: A flood of 741 poems, from 42 states, and 23 countries.
Winners were chosen.
Poems posted.
Cash prizes awarded.
But that wasn't enough.
Recognizing the bounty of good work, Spirit First Director Diana Christine Woods suggested a book.
The result is Moments of the Soul: Poems of meditation and mindfulness by writers of every faith. The book features 84 poems by 61 poets from all over the world.
I am honored to be a contest winner and to have two poems — Unless You and Last Light — in the book. And I am grateful for the steady, earnest effort of Diana Christine Woods, and humbled to be in the company of creative, introspective writers.
Moments of the Soul can be purchased ($12) here and here.
Note: The deadline nears for the second annual 2011 Spirit First Poetry Contest. Submit your poems by January 31, 2011. For details, go here.
Greetings Readers!
It's been more than two years since I (with the help of friend/artist/webmaster Tracy Weil) created this website, and nearly a year since a platform change (from Blogger to SquareSpace). In that time, I have grown older, my eyes more tired, and my patience more thin.
The internet has changed how I read (more skimming, less absorption, scant retention). I want info quickly, cleanly and without much effort. I'm not yet reading Large Print books or wearing bifocals but I do spend a great deal of time online and appreciate easy-to-read sites.
All of which is to say, I have increased the font size on this site. Can you tell? Do you like it? Is it too much, or not enough?
Obviously I'm fishing for feedback. I've been studying my screen and annoying Tracy with my requests for half-point adjustments to a dizzying degree. I can't see clearly. How about you? What do you see? How do I look?
Thanks for your feedback. You're the tops! the bee's knees! the ampersand in my typewriter keys!
Eagerly yours,
Drew
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places and things.
You can't judge a book by its cover, a man by his clothes, or a gift by its bows, but a pretty package always makes me smile.
Today, I am thankful for ribbons, wrappings & bows.
Today, everyone I encounter embodies the spirit of Cranky Christmas. Frazzled with too much to do, in too little time, leaves even the most medicated a bit unhinged.
Not me (not yet). Let the cookies bake. The presents wrap. The parties revel on. Instead of a fevered fa la la, you'll find me absorbed in a book: Everything is Everything by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, a slam poet and the author of five poetry books.
Because there's a spunky holiday theme running throughout the collection — in the poems At the Office Holiday Party, The Art of Holiday Spirit: Astoria, Queens, and Season's Greetings — I unofficially crown Cristin the Queen of Tell-It-True Holiday Poets.
Season's Greetings
Sometimes I don't want to do anything at all,
not even the easy stuff, like decide what I want
to eat for lunch. I found out last night someone
I wished abject loneliness upon is now lonely
and I don't even want to think about how that
makes me feel. Now that's lazy, because maybe
it could make me feel powerful or vindicated,
but I'm thinking probably not. My partner & I
were doing the annual holiday cards last night,
and I kept saying, Who are we forgetting?
Who would be really cheered up by getting
a holiday card from us who's not already
on our list? And my partner said, Um, no one.
I don't think our holiday cards make that much
difference to anyone anyway. And I told him,
Well, if that's how you feel, why are we even
doing holiday cards at all? And we fought
about the joy our holiday cards did or did not
bring into the lives of our friends and family,
but make no mistake: at no time did we ever
stop doing our annual holiday cards:
me, drawing the cartoon versions of us wearing
santa hats or reindeer antlers, and him digging up
inside jokes to put in our talk bubbles, embossing
the back of the envelopes with our dachshund stamp,
the dog we consider an emblem of our relationship
because it words so hard, yet looks so ridiculous.
— Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
from Everything is Everything
Read. Write. Repeat . . .
May I offer a brief distraction?
Because life is more than words and you can't wear a poem, I like to amble through the fashion blogs.
I'm not interested in runway looks, emaciated models, or sticker shock. I'm a realist. I like stylish, affordable (read: thrifted) bargains.
Here are a few of my latest, favorite, fashion-focused blogs:
B. Jones Style
Hillary Quinn - The Bargain Hunter
I'm still searching for a fashion blog created by and for women over 40. No frump. No ladies who lunch. No overly natural looks. Does this niche even exist? Am I the only one on this hunt?
How about you? Where do you find fashion inspiration? Has fashion inspired your literary life? Or, conversely, has literature inspired your wardrobe ? (i.e. Are you wearing a bookish tweed blazer with elbow patches? Or a white house dress, ala Emily Dickinson?).
What's in your closet?
When it comes to life,
the critical thing is whether
you take things for granted
or take them with gratitude.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to appreciate people, places and things. This week I am thankful for:
Little Cuties
It's holiday season and I know because Little Cuties have arrived.
Little Cuties are actually Clementines but I'm a softie for a successful marketing effort so I'm sticking with the Cuties moniker. Known as the darling of mandarins, Little Cuties are small, seedless, sweet and easy-to-peel. A common sight during the winter months, Clementines have earned the nickname "Christmas Oranges" and are related to, but not the same as, the beloved Satsumas (though they all taste good to me).
Graupel 
It's not hail. It's not snow. It's graupel, a meteorological phenomenon that occurs when supercooled water droplets coat a snowflake. On the Oregon Coast it's the closest thing we have to a White Christmas. (Go here to listen to pronunciation — this site should also be on my thankful list).
What gives you pause this holiday season? On this Thankful Thursday, for what do you give thanks?
Vinegar and Oil
Jane Hirshfield
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it.
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Coming and going unfinished,
puzzled by fate,
like the half-carved relief
of a fallen donkey, above a church door in Finland.
This poem appears in The Best Spiritual Writing - 2010, a book I almost didn't buy. I was put off by the title, fearing a tract-like compilation of preach and praise. A quick flip, however, revealed essays and poems by respected, down-to-earth, writers: Billy Collins, Diane Ackerman, Philip Levine, Floyd Skloot, and more.
Religious vs. spiritual, it's become a distinction many of us feel obligated to make. I am not religious, I say, quick to distance myself from the judgement and arrogance organized religion has wrought. And yet, all these years I have still not scripted an explanation for the deep stirring within. In the book's foreword, Pico Iyer offers a thoughtful response that speaks to, and for, me:
"If someone asks me about my "spiritual life," I am likely to fall silent — even, perhaps, to go into hiding, because of my sense that whatever is deepest in us is that which can rarely be spoken. It's too enormous or invisible for words. In love, in crisis, in moments of transport we lose words as we pass out of ourselves into a larger presence or identity that has no need of the quibbles or the qualifications that words give body to; and yet sometimes I think that most of what I do is "spiritual" in that it has to do with trying to do justice to what our clearer moments have taught us; attending to the spirit that friends and circumstances bring me; being aware, always, that there is another world (some would say beyond, some would say within) the world we see and talk about."
