Arwen Donahue's Sensitive Storytelling

I'm currently obsessing over Arwen Donahue's work. I especially adore her new graphic stories at The Rumpus--here's one posted just today, "The Hungriest Color."

Kelly Popoff's Collages

 

 I can't get enough of Kelly Popoff's gorgeous artwork. This stunning piece is called "First Grade (O Children #00039)," and I just keep looking at it, into each child's face, at the images projected/revealed there.

I hope you're writing, or reading, or making art. I am! Sending you creativity and gentleness and the energy to keep going.

Revising Toward This

Things are quiet here on the blog, but I'm bee-busily revising. This image has been helpful for me, and maybe it will be for you, too.

Cross-Pollination and Book Trailers

This week, I received a beautiful gift. My friend Amy Monticello (who is a wonderful writer and teacher) had her students choose books to read whose authors agreed to be interviewed. I was happy to do so, and her student Kristen Sallaberry reached out a couple of months ago with some fun questions about my book, In the Kettle, the Shriek. Yesterday, Amy shared that Kristen made this gorgeous book trailer to accompany my book. I absolutely love it--I found it so touching to see how sensitively Kristen translated the mood and images from the poems. I loved the way the camera treats landscape and details of scenery, the dreamy atmosphere, and the introspective music (I didn't know the "Lanterns Lit" song before, but it is right up my alley).

What an absolutely beautiful and inspiring surprise. What a gift writers and readers and artists are to one another.

What youth is

is the gift of unaccounted for time

What to make of our unremembered times
Rinsing my face
Pulling a loaf of wheat bread from the grocery shelf
by its twist-tied piggy tail of cellophane
An elevator One elevator in a lifetime of elevators
All that has happened in one minute fed
forever to the meter

What will it mean if I enjoy these or not

Youth doesn’t ask