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 […]
In the same way a baby puts everything in his mouth to see what is like, I put words on paper. The difference between a poet and a Buddhist is that a poet doesn’t mind suffering. As a poet I think of myself as a nightshift stenographer hired by the muse to take down the […]
Language is a kind of math. One letter added or taken away can dramatically change an equation. Writing is a like a scientific experiment with millions of theories to test, millions of combinations to figure with millions of results. A finished poem is like a tested theory, a solved problem, one with a common denominator […]
I got punked on Saturday by a Primland Resort photographer while attending Primland’s Golden Eagle Tree House ribbon cutting. My definition of “punked” is when I go to cover an event and take photographs and end up being photographed by someone else covering the event. This picture of me geocaching, a kind of treasure hunting […]
