Bethany Reid at SoulFood
January 16, 2014
I had a wonderful time co-featuring with Bethany Reid at SoulFood Poetry Night last Thursday. Many thanks to series co-curators Michael Dylan Welch and Tanya McDonald, who created a wonderful atmosphere for sharing poetry. Thanks, too, to SoulFood Coffee House, home of Victoria the Espresso Machine. And much gratitude to Bethany, who provides the play-by-play and many kind words here. Have I told you how much I adore her collection, Sparrow?
Sparrow: Poems by Bethany Reid
I’m thankful for an abundance of opportunities to share poetry in the New Year. Next week, I get to participate in the SoulFood Poetry Night at Soul Food Coffee House in Redmond, Washington. I’ll be reading with Bethany Reid, whom I also had the privilege of interviewing for the Blog Hop last February. She’s author of the poetry collection Sparrow, which won the Gell Prize in 2012.
The poems in Sparrow are gorgeous. Bethany writes about growing up on her family’s cattle farm, about her daughters and horses (I especially love her poems about horses)–and in language that’s precise, original, and felt by the body. I got to hear her read some of the poems in Bellingham last October, and her voice lends these poems an even-more pleasurable presence.
SoulFood Coffee House is located at 15748 Redmond Way; click here for map and directions. Our reading will start at 7:00, followed by an open mic at 8:00. Please join us if you can!
Caitlin Thomson’s WORD & IMAGE Tumblr, June 20, 2013
Caitlin Thomson, whom you may remember from last winter’s Blog Hop project, is doing many lovely things. Among them, she’s curating a Tumblr site called Poem & Image that pairs short passages from poems with eye-catching images. She explains her approach, and her goal of helping to make poetry more accessible to non-poetry readers, in her new blog post titled “Poetry, Popularity, and Image.”
Last week, Caitlin did me the honor of choosing a passage from my poem “Ten Great Gifts for the Woman Who Has Nothing” to present with a luminous seascape image. Thank you, Caitlin, for your thoughtful work with my, and everyone else’s, words.
The Blog Hop carries forward, and I’m pleased to introduce you to Meg at The Members Lounge, one of the writers tagged by Amy Shouse (a.k.a. Cupcake Murphy at OddGoodTrue). Here, Meg details her ideas for a book she’d title My Family and Eugene O’Neill.
Write it, Meg, write it! It’ll be wonderful!
Today, Caitlin Thomson responds to the interview questions about the Next Big Thing in her writing. She has terrific news to share! Please hop on over to Caitlin’s blog to enjoy the details. While you’re there, explore her beautiful web site connected to it and learn more about her first chapbook and her other writing projects.
Amy Shouse’s Next Big Thing!
Dear Readers,
Today, the Blog Hop bounces to poet Amy Shouse, who blogs as the magnificent Cupcake Murphy at OddGoodTrue.com. Get your Holy Grail on and read her very entertaining interview (written in her hilarious, devastatingly insightful Cupcake style) about her book Underway, Looking Aft. Enjoy!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Bethany Reid
Today, writer Bethany Reid, who graciously agreed to be “tagged” in the Blog Hop, has posted her responses to the interview questions about The Next Big Thing in her writing and her generous write-ups of several blogs she follows. Please click on over to both parts and enjoy!
Bethany Reid earned her MFA and PhD at the University of Washington. She is author of a chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom (Bellowing Ark Press), and served as an editor for The Seattle Review. She has won the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize at Calyx and, in 2012, the Gell Prize for her poetry collection Sparrow. She lives with her family in Edmonds, Washington, and teaches at Everett Community College.
Today, Chicago poet and editor Marilyn Cavicchia carries on the Blog Hop by posting about The Next Big Thing in her writing. Click here to read her delightful interview about what she’s working on!
Marilyn Cavicchia is an editor at the American Bar Association and a freelance editor at home. She received a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in journalism, both from Ohio University. For about 15 years after college, she wrote hardly any poetry. Since resuming in 2009, she has had about a dozen poems published in literary journals. Her next challenge: chapbooks.
My thanks to both Andrew McBride and Tsena Paulson for “tagging” me in a nifty writers’ game called Blog Hop, or, The Next Big Thing. How it works is that one blogger chooses three to five others to “tag”; these “taggees” then answer a series of interview questions, designed to highlight their “next big” writing projects, on their own blogs. Then, these writers each “tag” three to five more writers to answer these interview questions on their own blogs, and so on.
The “hop” part comes in as a result of all these writers linking to each other’s blogs. In this way, readers can click through as far as their curiosity carries them, exploring the blogs of as many writers as they wish. The connections work both up and down the chain of taggers and taggees. For instance, Tsena and Andrew “tagged” me in their blog posts last weekend; before that, they were both tagged by Stephanie Renée dos Santos, a Pacific Northwest writer of historical novels who now lives in Brazil. As a result of this chain of tags, I now know about Stephanie’s blog and writing projects, and she knows about mine. (Hi, Stephanie!) She and I both know, now, about the writers tagged by Andrew and Tsena, and all four of us know about the third writer tagged by Stephanie: Portland, Oregon-based Christian DeBenedetti, whose specialty is BEER.
And now you know about them, too!
I welcome my new readers who’ve ended up here as a result of Stephanie’s, Andrew’s, and Tsena’s Blog Hop posts. Thank you so much for reading!
On Monday, January 29, I’ll be posting my responses to the set of interview questions about The Next Big Thing(s) on my writing desk. At that time, I’ll also be naming and posting biographies of the writers I’ll be tagging to carry the Blog Hop forward!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Jennifer Bullis 