 Mary Lee Hahn has Poetry Friday today. I am keeping short and sweet today. Yestersday I sent my WIP to a poet-author for a manuscript review. I've taken a couple of classes with her and I am thrilled for her to read the newest revision. Today, I brought a friend up to the library in Welches, OR to see "Far Flung Places" This is my statement about the exhibit: "Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown." ~ Anthony Bourdain In 2020, I was preparing to travel to Ireland and Japan. Covid hit. We rescheduled to 2022. Last summer, I visited Japan with my eldest grandchild. "Far Flung Places", highlights the unknown teetering places where I felt a deep connection. Each piece is paired with a poem.
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Heidi at my juicy little universe is hosting our weekly poetry fest. She will be sharing the next line for this year's progressive poem.
First off, apologies for neglecting hosting duties last week by not visiting your posts. I plan to correct that after this post. Also, if you are on the Wordpress platform, Wordpress hated me. I can never get my comments to post. I have changed my password so many times! Next week is the end of semester at Texas Woman's University. It's been a great year. I am especially happy to have worked with Heidi Bee Roemer with the midterm project. My students have successfully submitted their work to Heidi's Steamed Power Poetry Contest. Please take a moment to enjoy these videos. Mariana V.: At The Pet Shop by Heidi Bee Roemer. Clarissa R.:Welcome to the Science Lab by Heidi Bee Roemer Sierra B.: Name That Seed! by Heidi Bee Roemer Aisha L.: Ode to the Washing Machine by Rebecca Kai Dotlich Victoria T.: My New Remote by Ken Nesbitt Note: The static audio at the beginning is intentional. Jaime A: Ms Quito Bandito by Heidi Bee Roemer Brandi B: Computer Tutor by Charles Ghigna Jeanne-Marie M: Ghazel For the Sky.mp4 by Mary Lee Hahn Samantha M: E-Reader! E-Reader! By Heidi Bee Roemer Minerva R: Time is Winning by Janet Wong Sarah S: The Blue Whale by Heidi Bee Roemer
Welcome to Poetry Friday. I'm hosting today and am looking forward to seeing what our poetry community is serving up this week.
Shirley Thacker is a poet I met at the Highlights Foundation poetry workshop with Rebecca Kai Dotlich and Georgia Heard in 2018. She remembered that that I sat in the back. We've kept in touch since then through more Georgia Heard classes and on Zoom Poetry Pop-Up calls. I have enjoyed getting to know her and her two adorable golden doodles. I love that Shirley is independently publishing and giving the profits to causes that fill her heart. Wind Beneath the Pines will go toward housing homeless veterans and the local veterans coffee club. 
JRM: I believe you have shared about how you came to poetry in our Poetry Pop-ups. I would love for you to share with my readers.
SH: My writing journey started later in life for me. I never liked writing in school, but I was smart enough to ask what the teacher/professor wanted. Then I just dished it out. . . no feeling, no emotion. Juist get it done, check it off. When my husband died, I wanted to write his story for hospice. I found the Indiana Writing Project. . . learned the art of writing for my students and myself. There is such power in writing. I have written every day since 2006. Poetry came a little later. I enjoyed mentor texts that were poetic. I found Georgia Heard, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Lester Laminack, Ralph Fletcher, Amy Ludwig Vanerwater, J. Patrick Lewis . . . and many others. The excitement of the students with certain authors was what inspired me. I have taken many, many conferences through Poet's Studio, SCBWI, Highlights, Ball State University to improve poetry. JRM: How did you decide which poems to include in Wind Beneath the Pines? SH: My husband suggested Wind Beneath the Pines over 25 years ago. I wasn't even writing then. We would sit in the shade of our pine trees and he said they made a sound like no other trees. It was like stories blowing on the breeze . . . like conversations whirling around the supper table or front porch. After he died, I found writing love. I really thought this would be a book of short stories, memoirs. It has taken many shapes over the years. Some of the poems are those memoirs that I had already written and revised into poetry. I found Cheritah poetry in 2020 when I needed something to do. . . I saw Matt Forrest Essenwines you youtube on that kind of poetry. I fell in love. My book, Lessons from My Students, evolved from that youtube. The six word poems just intrigue me. The 11 work poems are such an excellent bridge from narrative to poetry. Free Verse has always been my favorite because I can shape however my heart leads me. Georgia Heard shared found poetry and tricubes. . . i see poetry everywhere. JRM: You provided the cover for Wind Beneath the Pines. Are those the pines you can see from your porch? SH: Never Alone Publishing's publisher suggested the artist for the cover, Fran Platt. She sent me some suggestions. I described our trees, my husband, the sounds of the trees. She came up with the cover. When my husband was in high school, he ran from his house through Mounds State Park to his dad's filling station to work. This reminded me of that park. JRM: What was the process for organizing the poems for this collection? SH: The purpose of Wind Beneath the Pines was to honor my husband and the faith he had in me. My writing is truly a God given talent. The way it all happened was God given moments. The second reason for the book was to inspire young or old to write their own poetry. I wanted to have examples for the types of poetry that I enjoy. At the end of the book I write poems about my husband, Rich, using the forms. I also have invitations for them to write if they feel a connection. (My Comp Camp students made it clear that prompts are not invitations to writing. There is a difference.) JRM: Did you write the poem for this specific collection or was it a result of looking over the poems you’ve written and selecting your favorites? SH: These are all a potpourri of my writing over time. I didn't really sit down and just write for the book, except writing the ones about Rich using all the forms. JRM: How did you find Never Alone Publishing? SH: I met Kim Autrey, publisher at Never Alone Publishing, two years ago at Taylor University's Christian Writing Conference. I really enjoyed our conversations and mentorship. Then when I found the name of her company, I knew she would publish my next project. My favorite hymn is NEVER ALONE. Again, I felt this was a God thing. I had published three books with Zondervan, and four books at Kids At Heart, one with KDP. Never Alone was cost effective for me which is so important because I donate all profits to charity. JRM: You are donating the proceeds of the books you write to your favorite charities. Could you share more about that? SH: I just feel that if I have any talent to write, it is God given. He gives us talents to use and share. From the beginning of my writing journey, I knew that would be my path. I get the joy of writing every day. then I can share the profits to help causes near and dear to my heart. A Red Chevy in Heaven? was the first book I published. It took fourteen years. I would take it to conferences and meet with authors and agents. They gave me suggestions. I revised. I put it on the shelf thinking I wasn't good enough. I would get it out and take it to another conference, meet, revise, put it away. It was a vicious cycle. The story was about my grandson and all the things he said when his Pap had died. AJ said, "Nana, aren't you ever going to get this book published?" I was determined and found Zondervan. We decided it would be good to give the money to Wounded Warriors in honor of Rich, a Vietnam Veteran. But in the meantime, AJ's football coach was killed in a tragic accident. We gave the 2018 sales to his football scholarship and other sales would go to our elementary school. Surviving the Journey profits went to Dr Einhorn/IU Med Center's cancer research. You Are Somebody (child suicide and bullying) profits went to our elementary school. Lessons from the Students: A Memoir of 42 Years of Teaching profits went to the Latchkey program. Buzz Wears a Magical Vest profits went to Brighter Path LLC for equine therapy for students and veterans. We All Need profits went to Grateful Rescue/Pamela Terhune's rescue of animals. Farm Animals: Art, Poetry, Photos profits go to the Veterans Matter to house homeless veterans and the local veterans coffee club. Joy profits go to our elementary school. Wind Beneath the Pines will go to house homeless veterans and the local veterans coffee club. We all have talents and purpose in this life, I just want to help my corner of the world be better. I think I can do that with my love of writing and poetry. A few of Shirley's poems From the Six Word Section Courage each day, walking life's road From the Elfchen Section: Hummingbirds Flit, flutter Majestic beauty, inspire Humming sound soothes souls Amazing From the Tricube Section: Poetry Words from heart Memories Feelings or Emotions Shared. . . heartfelt Writer and Reader share Joy of words Thank you, Shirley. My found six-word poem from Shirley's shared poems: Amazing words, sharing heartfelt moments. ©JRM, draft 2025. Looking Forward to Reading Your Poetry!© Graphic by Amber Fleek Irene at Live Your Poem has the poetry round up today. She has a lot of cool poetry happenings like a poetry gumball machine. Matthew Forrest Esenwine has published several poetry but this month he has a debut poetry anthology, A Universe of Rainbows: Multicolored Poems for a Multicolored World. I was lucky to have Matthew answer a few questions about this anthology.  JRM: This is your first anthology. What made you decide you wanted to create one? MFE: When I first came up with the idea of doing a rainbows-themed poetry collection in early 2019, I began researching all the different rainbows in the world - many of which I never even knew about, like pilot's glories, rainbow scarabs, and Colombia's Caño Cristales (aka, the Rainbow River). But the more I thought about what rainbows represent, like hope and diversity, the more I thought pulling a bunch of poet friends together and creating an anthology of diverse voices would be a cool way to approach the project. JRM: What surprised you about creating an anthology? MFE: Several folks have asked me that, and I'm not sure I was surprised by anything, to be honest! Even though I'd never assembled an anthology before, I've contributed dozens of poems to anthologies and literary journals over the past few decades, so I had a good understanding of what I'd likely need to do; plus, I spoke with Lee Bennett Hopkins, the Pied Piper of Poetry himself, before I began the process to see what he thought of the idea. He loved it! He offered some advice for putting it together and was even going to write the flower poem for the book, before he passed later that year. I'm grateful to our mutual friend Rebecca Kai Dotlich for stepping up and writing a poem about what was to be Lee's subject. JRM: Which came first: the categories or the poems from the poets? MFE: The categories and subjects all came first. As I researched, I wrote down all the subjects I thought would make for good poems and had a list of at least a couple dozen, which was more than I needed. But as I looked over the list to determine which subjects would stay and which would go, I knew I needed some sort of narrative, or structure, to hold the collection together, to give the book some cohesiveness. So I grouped the subjects into categories of "water, rock, animal, etc." to see what I could come up with, and eventually settled on the five categories you'll see in the book: "Rainbows of Light, "Rainbow Waters, "Living Rainbows," "Rainbows of Rock," and "Rainbows Beyond." Not that it's immediately obvious, but there's a narrative here, beginning with miniscule rain droplets refracting sunlight and slowly getting bigger and bigger, expanding the book's scope from water to plant and animal to mountains and caves and finally to the largest rainbow we know, the Rainbow Nebula in Orion. JRM: What kind of research did you do for the sidebars with the poems? In the poem “Hello, Pilot!”, did you know you would be researching the term “pilot’s glory"? Or was that a result of Renee M. LaTulippe’s poem? MFE: The pilot's glory phenomenon was one I'd never heard of before, but I thought that, for a child, the idea of looking 'down' at a rainbow was intriguing - not just poetically, but visually. Once I had all the poems in hand, I sat down and wrote the sidebars so that I could reference the poems and try to make all the text as cohesive (there's that word again!) as possible. JRM: Tell us more about your experience at the Zhangye Danxia GeoPark. It looks like it would be amazing. MFE: I've never been there, but it does look like a fantastically amazing place to visit. Coincidentally, when I was signing ARCs of the book at NCTE in Boston last Nov., we ran out of copies and switched to half-size prints of that particular spread. As I was signing them, a young Asian woman in line exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, this is where I grew up!" We were all stunned! But it was true: she was from China and had grown up right nearby this amazing geological feature. Can you imagine living next door to that?? JRM: Was there a poem that isn’t in the book that you wish you had included? MFE: Yes and no - I did write a poem about rainbow clouds, but ultimately opted to not use it because I felt there were enough sky/weather type poems already and didn't want to load up the book with too much of the same thing. So it's somewhere between a polished draft and final draft: Rainbow Clouds On arctic nights we ebb and flow higher than the cirrus go; bending light, begin to glow, and in the sky - Oh! What a show! – © 2024 Matt F. Esenwine, all rights reserved I do mention rainbow clouds in the anthology, though, as I thought they were an important aspect of the science behind rainbows. I make reference to them in the sidebar for the first poem in the anthology, Nikki Grimes' lovely "The Saturday of No." JRM: What plans do you have for another anthology? MFE: I actually have two more on the way! One is under contract with Eerdmans and will hopefully see the light of day by maybe 2028 or 2029, and another will likely soon be under contract with a different publisher, with a tentative date of 2028. I have plenty of others I'm submitting as we speak, too!  With Jamey, his talented illustrator.  ICYMII missed last week's Poetry Friday. I posted these videos from my Texas Women's University students. I want to make sure people get to see them.
This year for the midterm project, I took some poems from poetry friends as well as working with Heidi Bee Roemer who has a most excellent Steamed Power Poetry Contest. Students selected from a variety of poems. They are encouraged to submit the poems to the contest but that is optional. Here are the first five of ten poems. Enjoy. Mariana V.: At The Pet Shop by Heidi Bee Roemer. Clarissa R.:Welcome to the Science Lab by Heidi Bee Roemer Sierra B.: Name That Seed! by Heidi Bee Roemer Aisha L.: Ode to the Washing Machine by Rebecca Kai Dotlich Victoria T.: My New Remote by Ken Nesbitt Note: The static audio at the beginning is intentional. |
AuthorAll photos and poems in these blog posts are copyrighted to Jone Rush MacCulloch 2006- Present. Please do not copy, reprint or reproduce without written permission from me. 
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