What drew me into the room was the ordinariness. These paintings and drawings were not of dancing girls or opera dames or absinthe addicts. The color palettes were not of bright yellows or hypnotizing blues; there were no splashes of shocking red in a flower...
I was walking one day through the misty shadows of my life wondering about the why of my world, the why of my work and thinking I should be more useful. Useful like a train engine able to drag and to push, to travel great distances or only move other cars around a...
I’ve been rereading May Sarton’s powerful Journal of a Solitude, and it’s a perfect companion to Minerva Rising’s upcoming Issue 7: Wilderness, which you can submit to now. What does the idea of wilderness inspire in you? I think of the vast rooms and spaces in my...
My photographer mother, Melabee M. Miller, has always told me to look: Look up. Look behind. Look around. Look outside the frame. She composes photographs with her eye and then frames them with the camera. Looking is the perfect writing lesson. Start with an image,...
When I think of the wilderness, trees, bugs, animals and unfamiliar terrain come to mind. It terrifies me. In fact, I am more comfortable walking alone through the city than I am walking in the woods. Though I’m not crazy about all the city noise, I feel more in...
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” I can think of no better description of my writing process than this quote by Michelangelo. If I have...
Your recent prompt for blog entries about art struck me for the number of ways it matched my thought process while writing my poem, “Perspectives.” When my daughter, Kailey, sent me this yoga selfie, I was transfixed by the difficulty of any person finding the point...
Hammock To a kitchen, to a jungle To sanctum, to circus As I rock in my hammock and smell the warm bananas baking with the butter and the wheat, Smell the fecund river teeming with piranhas and leeches and snakes the girth of a strong man. Rocked, in...
Being a dog owner has proved to be one of the most challenging, but extraordinary experiences of my life. When I was lodged in the mud of a toxic relationship, I decided to get a puppy. Ruckus (his all-too-fitting name) became my very best friend in a way that other...
One of my oldest friends, who’s not a writer, recently said to me, “I think you need to move on in your work.” Move on, she means, from writing about pregnancies, babies born premature, NICU stays — poems reverberating with the despair of a new...
