Allyson Whipple

Category: goals

  • My First Successful Sealey Challenge

    My First Successful Sealey Challenge

    After many years of trying and failing, I finally completed The Sealey Challenge, in which you attempt to read a book of poetry every day during the month of August. This is the 10th year of the challenge, and I’ve been trying for the last five, so victory is sweet! 

    Since life is hectic, I gave full-length collections, chapbooks, and literary journals equal consideration. I didn’t plan a reading list in advance (like the people who run the challenge suggest), but rather pulled a book off my shelf whose length reflected how busy I was that day. (I’m also trying to read through my entire bookshelf, but that’s a post for another day.) Below are all the books I read, divided by category. If these books are available for purchase, I’ve linked to them. Note that some of these were limited-edition runs that are no longer easy to find. 

    I had considered doing mini-reviews, but that would make for an exceedingly long post, and anyway, I didn’t necessarily come away with thoughtful commentary for some of these books. I hope that this list inspires you to check out some new poetry in the final third of the year.  

    Full-Length Collections

    Domestic Violence by Eavan Boland

    Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros

    My Wicked Wicked Ways by Sandra Cisneros

    One Breath by Ben Gaa

    A Wild Blue Sky by Ben Gaa

    Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings by Natalie Goldberg

    Cartography by Cindy Huyser

    The First Dare by PMF Johnson

    Caliche Road Poems by David E. Meischen

    Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara

    Chapbooks

    Orbital Shift by Jan Benson

    pagan rites by John J. Dunphy

    Poems from Snail Hut by Barry Gifford

    Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems by Cindy Huyser

    island by Kristen Lindquist

    weathered clapboard by Elliot Nicely

    Second Avenue by Frank O’Hara

    Dust of Horses by Chad Robinson

    A River Bends in the Road by Bob Stewart

    County Fair by Eric Sundquist

    Anthologies

    The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns, translated by Matt Weingast

    Journals

    #FemkuMag 34

    #FemkuMag 37

    Mayfly 52

    Mayfly 54

    Mayfly 68

    Mayfly 77

    Mayfly 80

    Mayfly 81

    Modern Haiku 56:2

  • The Best of It: Late May Edition

    The Best of It: Late May Edition

    1. Being honored with a 2025 Soulard Star award at this year’s membership party.
    2. The success of this year’s rummage sale.
    3. It’s iced tea season.
    4. The Roaring exhibition currently running at the St. Louis Art Museum.
    5. Getting to show Texas friends around the neighborhood.
  • Soulard Haiku Walks Launch in October

    Soulard Haiku Walks Launch in October

    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:

    1. Provide free haiku education in a digestible format.
    2. Provide space for people to practice writing haiku without worrying about critique or judgment.
    3. Create a family- and beginner-friendly event.
    4. Explore Soulard and learn about its unique history.
    5. Recognize that haiku can be written in any environment, and that urban spaces are just as legitimate haiku spaces as pastoral ones.

    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!

  • New Year, New Home

    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.

    The North American House Hippo is, as far as I can tell, not related to any specific kigo.

    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!

  • The Best of It: Creative Quarantine Edition

    Manuscript pages
    1. I have a new chapbook manuscript.
    2. I sent it to a chapbook contest.
    3. Tomorrow I’m hosting the Austin Haiku Group via Zoom, and am grateful we have a chance to get together virtually.
    4. I was asked to judge a contest in the Austin Poetry Society annual awards.
    5. I have three projects-in-progress right now, and I am enjoying working on all of them.

  • Word for the year

    year_of_revision

    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:

    1. Finally finish my one-act play
    2. Find a home for “Mitzvah”
    3. Go back to West Texas
    4. Get a mentor for my poetry collection
    5. Work my poetry manuscript every day
    6. Take my camera with me more often
    7. Learn photo editing
    8. Figure out what role dance plays in my current artistic life. Then dance.
    9. Get my poetry festival off the ground. Setbacks be damned.
    10. Learn to make tortillas from scratch
    11. Be patient. Art always takes longer than I think it will.
    12. Teach more writing workshops

    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.

  • The Artist’s Way: Week 2

    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 Accomplishments

    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.

    • Drafted 40 poems
    • Submitted 21 poems
    • Submitted chapbook
    • Wrote and submitted a piece of creative nonfiction
    • Began planning the First Annual Austin Feminist Poetry Festival

    A couple of things in August did not go as planned:

    • While doing research for my horror novel, I realized my initial idea was just not going to work. I scrapped my plans to mull things over. And while thinking things over, I ultimately decided that I don’t really enjoy the process of trying to write novels. Stories and essays and poems are enjoyable; there’s something about writing and revising novels that, ultimately, I don’t really love. So I’ve decided to scrap long projects and focus on shorter works. As a result, I’ve decided to start the horror project over again from scratch, as a series of linked short stories. The main concept will still be there, but this will be radically different from what I had intended.
    • I did not apply for the fellowship I wanted, because I found out my friend’s wedding would conflict with the conferences. Maybe next year.

    With these shakeups, here’s how the rest of the year is shaking up:

    • Poetry every day.
    • Put plans into motion for the poetry festival. (So much to do. So little time. This is intimidating. But fun.)
    • September-October: Research and sketches for horror project.
    • September/October: Apply for the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.
    • October/November: apply for a grant from AROHO.
    • November: Draft the horror project for NaNoWriMo, even though I won’t be writing an actual novel. (This is what’s known as a “NaNo Rebel.”)
    • December: revisions on horror project.

  • July Accomplishments

    As I mentioned yesterday, July was a pretty wild ride, at least for my writing. Here’s a rundown of what I accomplished.

    • Drafted 39 poems
    • Sent out my chapbook manuscript
    • Submitted 10 poems (and admittedly did not send out work the last week of July, but will make up for it with a double submission this week)
    • Finished a short story
    • Began making mindful writing (specifically small stones) as a part of my daily work. As you might remember, I did the River of Stones challenge in January. Well, the practice lapsed through the rest of the winter and spring. But this month, the desire to have moments of quiet observation and reflection became very strong, so I returned.
    • Finished the rough draft of Cutting Teeth. It’s just over 43,000 words, making it a novella rather than a novel. But, as I mentioned in an email to a friend, I’m okay with that. I feel at home with short poems rather than epics, with short stories over long ones, and with novellas rather than novels. I like condensed forms. I like creating works that can be absorbed and digested in the span of a rainy afternoon. Plus, the most recent issue of Poets & Writers noted that the novella is on the rise thanks to epublishing. I don’t plan to touch the draft for several more months because there are some other books I want to write as well, but I look forward to revisiting it soon.
    • Attended the Body Bliss poetry workshop at Gemini Ink. It was taught by the amazing Celeste Guzman Mendoza and combined yoga, creative movement, reading and writing. I wrote two poems that made me very happy, and realized that I have to start reading Erica Jong. (I meant to blog about this more extensively, but drafting Cutting Teeth really ate into my time and energy.)

    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:

    • Poetry every day
    • August: do all research, plotting, and planning for my yet-untitled historical horror novel(la)
    • Also in August: apply for the USPiM Merida Fellowship Award
    • September: write first draft of historical horror novel(la)
    • October: do all research, plotting, and planning for my yet-untitled fantasy novel(la)
    • November: write first draft of fantasy novel(la)
    • December: revisions to Cutting Teeth

  • May Accomplishments

    Here’s what I did in May:

    • Wrote 32 poems
    • Submitted 24 poems
    • Submitted my manuscript
    • Finished and submitted three fiction pieces, one of which was accepted and published
    • Researched my NaNoWriMo 2012 project
    • Figured out the focus for my poetry collection

    I did not:

    • Finish my poetry table (still)
    • Work on my epic poem

    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.