No, this is not a picture of Jack Daniels but it is of Jack and Daniel. Jack is the co-founder of The Little River Poetry Festival and Daniel (on the 4-wheeler) is the owner of Floyd’s On the Water Kayaking and Canoeing where the festival took place over the weekend. Look for a story about the […]
Each mark is a dream / that tells more than one truth / and believes in the existence / of the next page… Packing a Suitcase for […]
There’s a lot of traveling in Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, my poetry collection being published by Finishing Line Press, whether it’s back-and-forth between the past and the present, between growing up on the coast of Massachusetts and writing poetry in my kitchen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, or between the rich […]
That’s a picture of me packing a suitcase for the afterlife, sorting a few years of poetry into a collection, one that reads like a memoir, explores the weight of loss, rummages through my childhood closet and is informed by dreams. I’m picking and choosing what fits and distilling the rest to its essence. Poet […]
Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife is a poetry memoir by Colleen Redman that is being published by Finishing Line Press (FLP), an award winning small press out of Georgetown, Kentucky. Redman writes and provides photography for The Floyd Press newspaper in Floyd, Virginia, and other regional publications. Her poetry has been published nationally, regionally, […]
My poetry memoir, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, has been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press (FLP), an award winning small press out of Georgetown, Kentucky. The 32 poem collection probes the questions: ‘How much does the essence of one’s psyche weigh? Is the soul the one carry-on that we can actually take […]
Haley Leopold, a Language Arts teacher at Springhouse Community School, recently posted a question on the Floyd Group’s Facebook page. She was looking for someone to talk to her class about spoken word, poetry readings and slams, someone who knows something about writing the kind of poetry that asks ‘Who am I’ and ‘Who am […]
Having The Sun magazine around is like having a bottle of wine in the fridge. If it’s there, I’m easily tempted to drink it, even before noon, and even though I know it will make me feel fuzzy. I don’t keep The Sun around because reading it makes me want to write. I don’t have […]
– The following are answers to questions from a writer’s blog hop that I was invited to participate in by Polly Brown from A Year to Think it Over. What am I writing/working on now? I recently finished a feature on a woman who hiked the Camino, a 500 mile pilgrimage through Spain and […]
First there was the new Artemis poetry reading launch, hosted by two Floyd editors and featuring the legendary Nikki Giovanni (which I wrote about HERE), and then, a week later, Floyd County Moonshine contributors read at the Floyd library. Between these two fine literary/art publications and the two reading events, along with the fact that […]
I’ll be reading with others at the local library with other Moonshine contributors on Thursday. Below is the editor’s press release. Above is a photo I took that was chosen for the latest cover. Author Casey Clabough and other local literary talents of Floyd and the New River Valley will gather at 7:00 p.m. on […]
Nikki Giovanni has style, not only as a poet and in the way she conducts herself, but in her appearance. In this case, as the guest of honor at the re-launching of the literary art journal Artemis, it was from head to toe. She was sporting some stylish cornrows and shiny blue shoes. I didn’t […]
When I’m searching for something to blog about and I’m feeling uninspired, I’m like a doctor with a hammer trying to get a reflex. When I finally land on an idea that has some kick to it, I know I’ve hit the right one. ~ Colleen When I first started writing I didn’t know that […]
No spit balls were thrown. No one giggled or whispered. The students actually listened and seemed interested in hearing my writer’s story. It was a small Literary Art Project class at the new Blue Mountain High School, where the students (currently six girls) are re-launching Artemis, a Roanoke literary arts journal that was founded in […]
I save old pieces of poems the way a junkyard owner saves old cars for parts. It makes sense that poets recycle, since poetry is a form of conservation, a shorthand of language. Writers use everything around them. They draw from what they know, and conserve their words to make their writing more efficient. We […]
I have a fantasy poetry shift. It lasts at least an hour every day. I imagine that I have to stop, take pen and notebook in hand, and see if I can make something out of nothing. I do it lying on the couch, like a therapy session, because, for me, writing poetry is a […]
“Maybe 1,000’s, but definitely not millions,” I told the young Blue Mountain School students when they asked me how many poems I had written, maybe a million? “How long does it take to write a long poem, when did you start writing and have you ever been published?” were some of the thoughtful questions these […]
I don’t know how I missed reading To Kill and Mockingbird in high school or why I never saw more than clips of the Academy Award winning movie, but I recently watched the PBS documentary on the Pulitzer Prize winning book and the life of its author, Harper Lee, and was enthralled. It wasn’t just […]
