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Open House

Another week, and time to get this resting puppy back on its feet! I feel for Miranda’s need to give herself a rest. So I hope she breaks out her cup of coffee, or Mother’s Milk herbal tea and relaxes to the music that is the blogs of creative women. And that you do, too! Enjoy!

  1. Liz Hum has gone a noveling and is excited it grows bigger bones.
  2. Elizabeth Beck overhauls her studio and admits she has a problem.
  3. Jennifer Johnson’s husband has hijacked her blog to show that poetry is in the genes.
  4. Kelly Warren is back on the market.
  5. Karen Winters is grateful she only lost some paintings in a tragic accident.
  6. Mary Duquette fights against the rising tide and wins.
  7. Brittany Vandeputte continues her war with disease while keeping pace with her renovation.
  8. Bec Thomas courts creative copyright laws.
  9. Lisa Damian’s writer retreat feels indulgent, but she makes it work for her by producing.
  10. Amy Grennell is making the most of of her shortened creative hour.
  11. Kate Hopper announces her toddler haiku contest winner and shares her favorite top seven (warning: lots of poopku).
  12. Carmen Torbus dreams big, feels vulnerable when dreams start to come true.

So, enjoy a lucky 13 blogs (and one more for luck, as I tapped 2 of Liz’s) with your morning cup of preference. Maybe it’s enough to last you through the holiday weekend.

Brittany: What I’m Attached To

After reading Kelly’s post from last week, it got me thinking about a similar topic that comes up in the lives of creative women — marketing ourselves. I’ve been to a couple of writer’s conferences now, and every one has stressed the importance of having a presence — taking advantage of any and all social networking opportunities, becoming active in the writing community at large, and creating an identity in cyberspace. Then in this month’s Writer’s Digest, six pages are devoted to Christina Katz’s article on building a “power platform.”  A strong platform, Katz says, includes an author’s Web presence, classes taught, media contacts, articles  published, public speaking services, and any other means available to make an author’s name known.

Lately, I’ve also become much more aware of where my name is and what it’s attached to. I Google myself periodically (am I the only one who does this?), so I know that my name is attached to my master’s thesis, the three playwriting awards I’ve won, and blog posts about my novel-in-progress. But my name is not attached to any short stories or poetry, and this frustrates me. I’m frustrated because while these aren’t my favorite forms of writing, I feel quite confident that if I just put my mind to it, I could write both, and write them well. Then I could submit them to literary magazines and develop the “street cred” that eludes unpublished novelists and playwrights.

The South Carolina Writer’s Workshop is the main literary arts organization in South Carolina. They put on the yearly writer’s conference, sponsor the Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Awards, and publish the Petigru Review, a literary anthology. I’ve joined the organization, attended conferences, and won two Carrie McCray awards. All that’s left is being published in the Petigru Review, at which point, in my own mind, I will have achieved state of South Carolina superstardom.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, and a week ago, when I got the last reminder e-mail, I thought to myself, “Oh, easy peezy. I can whip up a couple of submissions. How hard can it be?”

Oh Lord, please deliver me from my unfailing optimism…

I started re-working the Sam/Squirrel story for a nice nonfiction piece, but it’s still incomplete because 1) I’ve never written any kind of nonfiction before and it was stressing me out and 2) I got this truly compulsive desire to write a poem about a diphtheria epidemic that killed two of my great-great grandfather’s sisters on the same day (who also happened to be  the same approximate ages as Sam an John at the time).  A week later, I’m still working on it. It’s a horrible, stark, Spoon River-esque kind of poem and I have the worst of the three stanzas to go. I have done so much research on the topic that I’m almost too shell-shocked to continue. And it certainly hasn’t helped that John ran a high fever all last week and seemed seriously ill, or that Sam developed a nasty finger infection that required antibiotics. Writing about dying children while my own children were fighting illnesses of their own brought my little poem a bit too close to home.

But despite all my reasons for not wanting to write it, it is coming along, and that makes me feel good. It’s a beautiful poem, and something that I’d like to have my name attached to.

4/9 Weekly Creativity Challenge Winner and New Prompt

We’ve been reaching for beautiful things this week! (and I’m new to this WordPress editing system, so bear with me!) Four great entries, but the challenge winner this week is Carmen Torbus with her gorgeous painting titled “Reach”.  Carmen said, “This is my favorite painting and it’s perfect for this week’s creative contest!”.  Yes, indeed, Carmen, congrats!

reach-carmen3


From Cathy Coley, a haiku…

Reach

My baby drops it,

I bend over to reach it,

and get stuck that way.


From Bec Thomas, a photograph titled “Reaching Up”.  Bec also has a nice tag line in her email: “The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.” Ernst Haas

reaching-high3


And from me (Kelly), a photograph titled “Reaching Out”, a photo I took while walking around downtown St. Petersburg, FL, early one morning in back in February while I was there for our state student government conference. 

reaching4


This week’s prompt: “Farm”
Use the prompt however you like – literally, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, April 14, 2009.  Writers should include their submission directly in the body text of their e-mail. Visual artists and photographers should attach an image of their work as a jpeg. Enter as often as you like; multiple submissions for a single prompt are welcome. There is no limit to how many times you can win the weekly challenge, either. (You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter. All are invited to participate.) All submissions are acknowledged when received; if you do not receive e-mail confirmation of receipt within 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point is to stimulate your output, not to create a masterpiece. Keep the bar low and see what happens. Dusting off work you created previously is OK too. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

Creativity Challenge: What Are You Reaching For?

Don’t forget about this week’s Creativity Challenge!  What are you ‘reach’-ing for today?

National Poetry Month: A poem a day

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Poets and WritersMasters of Verse, a free poem each day during the month of April. All featured work is from an iconic member of the (real-life) dead poets’ society.

I do find that poetry and stress seem to be incompatible activities. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, breathe deeply and read a stanza or two. Ah, that’s more like it…

Cathy: Weekend Update–the usual frustrations and a dose of sunshine

So many things interfered with so many plans I had this weekend. I won’t bore you with too many details, but while Baby C took a nap, and Honey took care of things he needed to at home (some side job work, some gutter cleaning), I grabbed one highly reluctant son and one enthusiastic one to head up to the other end of the town to the historic district and York River Beach on Saturday. The sun was out for the first time in weeks. We dipped our toes in the water. We walked on the storm barrier rocks. We sat and lay on the sand, dug holes and let the sun warm us like we hadn’t since last August. Aaaaah….

04040914471The teen was acting a bit anti-social (I had interrupted his very important tv viewing agenda, and his afternoon shower before another sleepover at the fellowship) but I think he enjoyed himself in his own reluctant way. S thoroughly enjoyed kicking jellyfish away, digging a hole to semi-bury himself, and climbing and finding rocks and shells. I soaked up some rays, watched my guys be themselves, stood up straight without the baby on my hip and enjoyed the view. The sun, breeze and water are the best ingredients to rejuvenate my spirit after so much time spent indoors. People were all over the pier, walking dogs, cycling, sailing in the distance. It was a beautiful day.

0404091439Sometimes, no matter how much laundry, lawn mowing, reorganizing, cleaning, etc., needs to be done, you just have to take advantage of the sun while it shines. And it helped me love the boys just a little more again – even if from 50 feet away. Maybe it was the distance that made the love happen. If K were grumbling next to me the whole time, I’m sure I would have grumbled back.

Later, we dropped him off and did the weekend home repairer’s trip to Lowe’s bathroom and plant departments. We bought a vertical yew for my piney mulch shady corner, and I had the sudden inspiration for a Jane magnolia tree I saw. I don’t wear much jewelry myself, so my indulgences in that regard go to adorning my yard.

On Sunday, we had hoped to take care of some things we didn’t on Saturday, but Baby C decided that steamrolling her parents all night was a better idea than sleep, so we woke up late. Since I had to pick up K, I had to go to service, therefore nothing got done. We were supposed to meet some other asperger’s families at Busch Gardens for the afternoon. Well, we made it to the park an hour late and without the cellphone (mine) with the phone number of the organizer in it, so we just did our own thing, enjoyed the afternoon and hoped we’d meet with them. We never did. Baby C had more fun on this one picnic table [below] than the rest of us did on the rides. She played “up and down,” danced, and smiled at everyone in the vicinity. She can be quite the charmer these days. Alas, this weekend, I kept walking out the door with no good camera, so these are all cell phone shots. But they still look fine to me.

04050915451So, no writing in the manuscript, even though I longhand wrote two big ideas for it in the past week. I’ll say that counts, though I still need to plug them into the manuscript and flesh them out a bit. No yard work on my part, except for buying trees. The summer clothes exchange is in the upstairs hall, and bathroom fixtures are all over the bathroom. Baby C’s home done one year portraits are put off for another week until we can set up the studio in the living room. But I had plenty of fun in the sun with my family. And that’s more important than griping about what didn’t happen from The List.

Kristine: Baby Steps…Literally

My daughter is learning how to walk. Over the weekend, she stood on her own, finally got her balance, and moved three steps before tumbling over. I was amazed. It was a major achievement in my eyes. My husband and I have been waiting for this milestone as she’s 16 months old and until this point showed no desire to move around unless she was crawling.

I showered her with cheers and kisses. My daughter, on the other hand, didn’t seem so thrilled about the whole thing. Actually, she got rather annoyed and didn’t feel like doing it again for the rest of the day. Every time I tried to walk with her, she’d get frustrated at her lack of balance and pull away. Isn’t that typical? She’s becoming more and more like her mother every day, I’m afraid.

My friends tell me these first steps mark the beginning of her true independence. Before long, she’ll be running out of the house to play with her friends, going to school and finding reasons to be away from me. Sigh. Okay, so maybe I’m happy with her crawling for a while longer.

So The Munchkin and I are learning our baby steps together. While she learns the courage to stand on her own feet, I’ll be learning to let her go…slowly, one step at a time.

Also, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and join Facebook. If I haven’t found you yet, let’s be friends!

Weekly Creativity Challenge Back in Action!

Though I don’t participate every week, I didn’t want to see this go, so I volunteered to take it over for Miranda with a couple changes.  Since I can’t commit to the $10 weekly gift certificate (Miranda, you rock!), let’s change it from “contest” to “challenge.”  Everything else will work basically the same. Sound like a plan?

This week’s theme is “reach.”  Use the prompt however you like — literally, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, April 7, 2009.  Writers should include their submission directly in the body text of their e-mail. Visual artists and photographers should attach an image of their work as a jpeg. Enter as often as you like; multiple submissions for a single prompt are welcome.  You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter; all are invited to participate. All submissions are acknowledged when received; if you do not receive e-mail confirmation of receipt within 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point is to stimulate your output, not to create a masterpiece. Keep the bar low and see what happens. Dusting off work you created previously is OK too. For more info, read the original contest blog post.