I’m thrilled to announce that next month, I’m launching a quarterly ginko (haiku walk) series around the Soulard neighborhood. The first event takes place on Saturday, October 26th at 9:30 a.m. It’s free, family-friendly, and open to anyone in the St. Louis area.
I’ve wanted to start hosting ginkos in St. Louis for over a year now, but with everything else I have going on, it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Finally, though, I realized I could start hosting them in conjunction with the Soulard Restoration Group Community Involvement & Events Committee.
Here are my goals for the series:
We will meet at the Soulard Community Garden and spend 90 minutes learning about haiku, walking, exploring, and writing. The event concludes at the historic Soulard Market, a great place to explore at the conclusion of events.
If you have any haikurious friends in the St. Louis area, forward this post along to them!
In the season finale of the Culinary Saijiki podcast, I talked with Mark Scott of Naturalist Weekly, which was one of my favorite blogs of 2022. In the conversation, I had the idea of spending 2023 investigating the micro-seasons around me. I decided that since I wanted to find a way to write more consistently in this space, I would make that my project for 2023.
Of course, the first month of the year is nearly over, and I’ve yet to get started! In part that’s because I’m balancing a full-time job, finishing my Pilates training, and my other haiku endeavors. But there was another challenge: it became clear to me that the micro-seasons Mark describes in his blog would have been developed over many years of watching and observing. An awareness of micro-seasons would also require one to be intimately familiar with the flora and fauna of their locale.
Having lived in Missouri for just over six months, neither of these things are particularly ingrained in my consciousness.
However, each of Mark’s blog entries ends with an invitation related to the micro-season that he is exploring. My plan is to use those to guide my explorations and writing for the course of the year. That will give me not just an opportunity for fresh poems, but also a way to help me connected to the geography of my new home. I look forward to seeing what transpires!
2012 was a very productive year for me. I generated a lot of new drafts. My chapbook was accepted at Finishing Line Press. I won two poetry prizes. I published two pieces of flash fiction. I published eighteen poems in print and online. I wrote memoir for the first time. I started a fiction critique group. I started learning kung fu. I did The Artist’s Way. I went to the beach. I completed a cycle of abecedarian sonnets.
My word for 2012 was trust. Trusting myself to take risks. Trusting myself to make mistakes. It paid off.
This year, I’m picking a writing-focused word. 2013 will be the Year of Revision. I write a lot. I’m good at drafting. But there are too many half-finished pieces lying around on my computer. So this year, I’m committing to revision over production. I’m going to focus on rewriting and finishing things. Yes, I’ll still be generating new work (if I didn’t, I’d have nothing to revise!). But the focus this year will be on honing and completing.
So revision is the focus, but here’s a rundown of what I plan for 2013.
In 2013, I will:
May your 2013 be busy in a good way. May it be fruitful. May it be filled with wonderful people and experiences and food. Good luck.
I finished week two of The Artist’s Way on Saturday, amidst the fun of the Georgetown Poetry Festival. The whole week was busy, between general life, working on the poetry festival, and an emergency root canal (one of the teeth damaged in my car accident a few years ago decided to start dying). I ended the week feeling like I hadn’t accomplished much, because it was a struggle to fit the exercises in with everything else. But I did work every day.
I’m really enjoying doing the morning pages, even though it requires getting up even earlier. My head feels clearer throughout the day when I do a big brain dump first thing in the morning. They’re definitely paying off. I also feel like certain projects I’m bandying around are coming together, especially my next poetry book. I have a title and a basic structure for the next collection, and it feels as though I’ll actually meet my goal of a rough manuscript draft by the end of the year.
This week’s progress was small, but no less incremental. I look forward to seeing what week three will bring.
August was one of my slower months for writing. Well, that’s not entirely true. It was a very good month for poetry; I just didn’t do much with other projects.
A couple of things in August did not go as planned:
With these shakeups, here’s how the rest of the year is shaking up:
As I mentioned yesterday, July was a pretty wild ride, at least for my writing. Here’s a rundown of what I accomplished.
I’ve made some slight adjustments to the writing plan I set up at the beginning of June, if only because the original arrangement would not allow me to actually draft a book during NaNoWriMo, and it doesn’t feel right to have a November go by without giving it a shot. So my intentions for the rest of the year are as follows:
Here’s what I did in May:
I did not:
I’m noticing how fluid my goals are, not just over the course of the year, but over the course of the month. I intended to not work on fiction in May and instead focus on my epic poem, and yet in my free moments, my list of fiction-in-progress called to me.
I’m noticing a trend here. Poetry is a habit that I can commit to, but it’s hard to tell at the beginning of the month which prose projects or long poetry projects I’ll want to work on as the month progresses. There are so many factors that influence my desire to work on prose/long pieces: work, energy, business on weekends, etc.
It almost feels as though I don’t have to set poetry goals right now. The year isn’t quite halfway over yet, but I don’t even have to think about what I’m doing with poetry and having to check myself. I don’t have to stay on task with it. Writing, revision, and submission are like eating or sleeping — they’re what I do.
Meanwhile, fiction isn’t a habit per se. I’m good at working on something, but what my brain thinks I should work on and what my heart wants to work on are two entirely different things.
These accomplishment posts are starting to feel derivative to write, as well. I wrote a lot of poems! I submitted a lot of poems! I did some stuff with prose, but not other stuff! Woo! Still, I enjoy having some way to track my progress on this blog. So I think I’m going to avoid setting the same old goals for June. I’m going to see where the month takes me, and decide how I want to summarize it on the 30th. We’ll see what happens.
At the beginning of April, I didn’t quite realize just how busy I was going to be, and how much I’d struggle to take time for my writing. But I still managed to accomplish quite a bit
Here’s what I did in April:
I did not
So while I wrote fewer poems this month than I did elsewhere this year, I’d say that, overall, April has been my most productive month to date. Especially since one of my goals (writing and submitting nonfiction) was not even on my list!
My plans for May are as follows:
I’m looking forward to this next month, and the work that emerges.