Musings for Moms - Where to Begin...

I recently posted this on Facebook, "All I’m going to say is I don’t care if your child plays a minute or for the full game… it’s not about winning or losing it’s how you play the game that matters… RESPECT

I’m lucky that Liam’s (and Col's) coaches teach the boys how to win and lose gracefully and respect everyone on that field."

The reason behind the post, well, what I saw at a few games from both the referees and the other team was disgusting behavior.

First, I get it, being a referee is the last thing I would want to do - A LOT OF PRESSURE - but the past two seasons it's like the refs just don't care what is happening out on that field - and they are the only protection our kids have out there... let me repeat that - THEY ARE THE ONLY PROTECTION OUR KIDS HAVE OUT THERE.

They should be blowing that whistle for a lot more than a kid throwing in a ball and lifting his foot... and as of late that seems to be the norm.

Spitting is far worse than hitting - I would think even more so now with COVID... but the ref didn't see a player get spit on even after the players were saying the boy got spit on - game went on as usual....

Another game, a kid got seriously hurt when an opposing player leapt up and tackled the player - the ref started the game before a replacement player was even out on the field for the injured one. The tackeler didn't get removed nor did the coach go over afterwards to say anything to the other coach... you know find out how seriously injured the kid was.

When did we become such a ruthless society? One that doesn't give a crap about anything else other than ones-self?

I think everyone needs to step back and reassess some things right now...

1. If referees don't want to make the tough calls - do not go out on that field. It may be easy money for you - but it is not worth it if you won't do what you are actually supposed to do out there...

2. Coaches - it is time to stop winning at any cost. Teach your players how to win without injury and cheating. Teach the players how to lose gracefully because let me tell you - life is full of both wins and losses and the kids that can't lose - well, it's not good.

3. Parents - please don't yell things like "do it again" or any of the other colorful phrases that are blurted out - after a kid is injured and you can hear him screaming in pain... It's tacky.

And that is all I got to say about that.... It really isn't I have so much more to say - but I am stopping myself.

The Bank Job

Circa 1850

“I hear you need a good teamster,” John Shelley said as he walked into the stable that doubled as an office.

“Yeah,” Bill Deane replied. “Do you have experience with horses?”

“Yes sir,” John said. “I was raised on a farm. I’ve handled two and four horse teams. What do you have in mind?”

“I need someone to help me do a bank job.”

“A what?” John said. 

“A bank job,” Bill replied. 

“Sorry, sir,” John said, turning to leave. “But I don’t do anything illegal.” 

“Hold on,” Bill replied with a chuckle. “It’s a delivery job. My company has been hired to deliver a big cast iron safe from the train station to the basement of that new bank downtown. It’ll be the bank’s main security for money and other valuables.

“We need a four-horse team to lower the safe down a special ramp we’ve had made. You said you have experience with four horse teams?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” John said. “If you have the team, I can do the job.” 

“A portion of the bank building’s foundation has been removed for us to deliver the safe. Crews will be standing by to restore the foundation and replace the soil once the safe is in place.”

“Looks routine,” John said.

Early on the morning of the delivery, John drove the four-horse team to pick up the big safe and bring it to the site on a low-slung heavy-duty wagon. A crew helped unload it at the top of the ramp and secure it to the horses’ harness with specially designed heavy-duty leather straps. John guided the horses as they began to lower the safe slowly down the ramp to the basement. 

All went well … at first.  

The safe was part way down the ramp when Shelley heard a loud ‘crack’. At first, he thought it was a gun shot. The straps holding the harness to the huge metal safe had broken. The safe began rolling down the ramp on its big iron wheels, gaining momentum as it went. No one dared try to stop it. The safe was moving at a brisk pace upon arriving at the cement floor. It went barreling across the room, the intended location, and crashed through a sturdy brick wall beyond, where it stopped. 

Startled workers rushed down the ramp, through the basement opening and approached the scene, preparing to survey the carnage. There, amid clouds of dust they found the safe, by some miracle still upright.  

It had crashed into the studio apartment of the recently appointed bank clerk. And there it stood, towering over the foot of a large double bed occupied by the bank clerk and a young woman, clutching bed sheets to her chest. The crew quietly turned and left the basement. They never learning her name. 

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 James Osborne is the author of five books including the Amazon #1 bestseller about ISIS and al Qaeda, THE ULTIMATE THREAT . His short stories have been published in dozens of anthologies, magazines, and literary and professional journals, as well as in a collection, ENCOUNTERS WITH LIFE.

Osborne’s varied career includes investigative journalist, college teacher, army officer, vice president of a Fortune 500 company, business owner, and writer/editor.

Kim Malinowski - Author Interview

 1. Tell us a little about yourself 

I am Kim Malinowski and I am a lover of words. I read the dictionary in the second grade and the thesaurus in the third. I earned my B.A. from West Virginia University, my M.F.A. from American University, and I studied with The Writers Studio. I am bipolar and have a litany of anxiety disorders. One medication that was used to treat my bipolar disorder caused aphasia for almost five years. I was humbled by the sharp difference between holding an M.F.A. and all of the writing dreams that went with it and the lack of any dreams when I could not even read a picture book. My medication was switched and taught myself to read and write again. Not everything I say or write is perfect because of this. But on the converse side, I write better with the new techniques I have taught myself (colored pens and word magnets) than I ever did even during my M.F.A. program. I have even begun teaching these techniques. I believe that I have been given a second, or even third chance, and that I will not waste it. My motto is “write like the stars will shatter like glass tomorrow.” I live like they will.

2. Tell us a bit about the book

My book Home was published by Kelsay Books in March 2021. The collection focuses on where home is and with whom it resides. I have been told by readers that is a book dealing with grief as well. The title poem, “Home,” begins in North Dakota where my grandfather was born and focuses on my narrator’s place or lack thereof in that world. The book travels through ancestors, grief, fitting in, and ends with a poetry sequence about a widow trying to find herself again after her husband’s death without losing her treasured memories. 

3.  What inspires your writing?

Daily life, adventures, writing workshops, history, folk lore, and my neo-pagan path all influence if not inspire my work. I always push my own boundaries and have started writing prose as well as poetry. I write atrocity and mental health poetry as well as speculative fiction and poetry.

4. Do you have a ritual when you write, favorite place to go or certain things you do before writing?

Before the pandemic, I would answer my living room or the local Starbucks. Now, I say my car and the McDonald’s parking lot. I do not joke that my next book will be dedicated to my local McDonald’s parking lot that greeted me several times a day during the pandemic and was not illegal to travel to. In terms of other rituals, I am all about the ‘right’ journal for the piece I am writing. I am in love with junk journals, and these allow me to get past writer’s anxiety. I do not believe in writer’s block. I have special journals for every project. I’m embarrassed to even try to count how many journals I have—but they all have a mission in my writing.

5. What’s next for you?

I have seven full collections, mostly novels in verse, that I am trying to find publishers for. I am a host and teacher on the Mighty Networks site The Terra Nouveau Lyceum and I run a writing portal in Moon Feather Hollow, also on the Mighty Networks. I teach “Hybrid Shorts” monthly for the Montgomery County Public Libraries, and I have been guest teaching at The Poetry Salon. I also am a blogger for borrowed solace.

6.  Where can we find you on social media?

My website is www.kimmalinowskipoet.com

My Facebook Author account is Kim Malinowski

Twitter Handle: @KimMalinowski3

Instagram: malinowskikim

The Terra Nouveau Lyceum (mn.co)

Moon Feather Hollow (mn.co)

7. Where can we find your book?

kelasybooks.com, Amazon, and most retailers.

Nora Kudis - Artwork

Ready for Fall 

Lilo's Halloween

Nora Kudis is a freshman at TJHS, and she likes to do digital art.  Her art account on Instagram is @nora.__.art and she is currently taking commissions! Nora hopes to become a Disney Imagineer or an illustrator when she is older.

 

Marjorie Maddox - Author Interview

 1. Tell us a little about yourself.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, at least after my little-girl desires to be a combination ballerina (I’m a klutz) and farmer (I kill everything I try to grow). I was fortunate to grow up in a supportive family,

who encouraged reading and writing, and I published my first poem in Campfire Girl Magazine when I was 8. (It was not great, but I persisted.) You may read more about my poetry journey here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/professor-marjorie-maddox-of-lock-haven-university-five-things-you-need-to-write-powerful-and-12967b3a8748

I received my M.A. in English with a Creative Thesis at the University of Louisville and was Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell, earning an MFA. I have been Professor of English and Creative Writing for over 30 years at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and have published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including  Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Readiing Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards) and A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems , I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (an NCTE 2021 Notable Poetry Book)—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and 650+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. I am the great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball. My husband and I live in Williamsport, PA, home of the Little League World Series. We recently became empty nesters, with our historian son and artist daughter graduated from college and out in the “real” world!

The chair of the jury of judges for the 2020 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Book Award, I love giving in-person and Zoom readings and workshops around the country. In addition, I’m delighted that my book Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press), as well as my ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts), are forthcoming in 2022. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com 

 

2. Tell us a bit about your newest books.

With my perfect timing (not), I had two books published in 2020 during the pandemic. Still, I’m very excited to have these books in the hands of children, tweens, teachers, and lovers of poetry.

Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Readiing Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards)

Based on my 30+ years as a teacher of poetry at the university, secondary, and primary levels, this book was a lot of fun to write! Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems teaches writing from inside the poem, with plenty of tips and tricks for first-time poets, avid authors, students, and teachers.  Chat with Personification, dance with Iambic, fish with Sestina, and text with Triolet. In twenty-seven poems and Insider Exercises, this book jump-starts your writing. (Young adults, 8—14, and their teachers).

Want to know more? Here’s a quick video introduction to the book: https://youtu.be/BGuuoKoxT9M

And you may find lots of reviews and recordings here: http://www.marjoriemaddox.com/inside-out-description-and-reviews

I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (an NCTE 2021 Notable Poetry Book)

Illustrator Philip Huber and I collaborated on an earlier book A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, a lively interactive book on collective nouns. It was great fun to join forces again for I’m Feeling Blue, Too!

I’m Feeling Blue, Too!—with its twelve riddle poems and fourteen illustrations—turns the “can’t-do-nothing” blues into an exciting exploration of inspiring color. Climb inside a spinning bubble, grab some sky from high above a trampoline, dive into the swirling ocean waves, stack a tower of dreams, and ride far into the night with a courageous knight. This book encourages kids to stop moping and start looking. In this book, the riddles and action all focus on the color blue. The book was named a 2021 Notable Book of Poetry by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Here’s a brief video introduction: https://youtu.be/Sqdd59c4cW8 and here’s a discussion with both the author and illustrator: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qa5m87fcv9v5n0h/2020-06-22-author%20event%20%281%29.mp4?dl=0

For additional interviews and reviews, check this out: http://www.marjoriemaddox.com/new-page-4

3. What inspires your writing?

The short answer is “life.” As writers—and as human beings—we are called to be witnesses of this world. And so, inspiration is all around us, whether it be a human interest story in the local newspaper, a small moment of joy, or tragic events of natural disasters and Covid-19. I especially am interested in the intersection of body, spirit, and medicine—my book Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize)—focuses on my father’s unsuccessful heart transplant—but I also write about literature, teaching, and writing; art; baseball; faith; current events, as well as anything that captures my interest on a day-to-day basis. I write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and children’s literature and am always switching things up a bit. I’ve got lots of projects on back burners, that’s for sure. 

4. What do you think is the most difficult thing about writing?

Conquering that blank page or screen. I’ve found it important to give myself permission to write a lot of bad poems before I get to the better ones. 

5. What’s next for you?

I am currently sending out a manuscript that focuses on my mother’s dementia, among other topics. The manuscript also explores the ways that we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, and see or don’t see those around us on both a personal and national level. Woven throughout the collection is a series of odes.

And I’ve got some new children’s manuscripts in the works.

6.  Where can we find you on social media?

Web site: www.marjoriemaddox.com

Facebook: Marjorie Maddox, Author

Twitter: @marjoriemaddox

7. Where can we find your books?

Thanks for asking! You may find links to all my books on my web page: www.marjoriemaddox.com

For my two newest books:

Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises is available from Kelsay Books, Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, and Bookshop.com

I’m Feeling Blue, Too! is available from Wipf and Stock, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and Bookshop.com

Susan diRende - Artwork

Maple Seeds

Ghost Light

 

Dry Creek Bed

Susan diRende’s writing has received recognition from the Philip K Dick Awards, Artists Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission among others. Her artwork has been in shows in New Zealand, Belgium, Mexico, and the US. Recent publications include The Dewdrop, the Pine Hills Review, and The Gaze Journal. She travels the world with no fixed abode.

A Pause in the Past (excerpts from the memoir, Second Wind: running away at 60)

 I called it my Vagabond Year, imagined it as an journey of rebirth and renewal, though some part of me knew it was also a flight from a self turning 60 with disappointed dreams. I’d spent a summer in New Zealand while the States went through winter. Then a second summer traveling around the United States to all the places I’d lived in my life. After a few weeks on the East Coast at my sister’s house readying for my launch across the Atlantic. I planned to finish my wandering year in Europe where my family still had ties and where I’d been happy studying and living abroad.

I watched the trees drop their foliage as I packed bags for my immanent departure. The weather may still have been hot, but the autumnal rains had come, pounding the leaves into mulch, burying the seeds and berries. As the leaves that hid their nature fell away, the trees announced themselves, their weight, their strength. All their budding, greening, and withering was just for show. The truth was in the sky peeping through or shining past the upright sentinels like the rays behind the heads of saints. When the branches were bare, the dance between them was clear. Subject and space carving patterns of wood and light.

My October 2 birthday loomed, the big 60, while I lingered at my sister’s house alone. She’d gone on a trip with a friend, and they wouldn’t be back by the actual day.  So I did what I’ve done more and more as I get older: I decided to take a solo trip and make a solitary celebration. I rented a car to go visit my alma mater in Williamsburg and drove off in the rainy morning mist.

I’d lived in Williamsburg twice. My family moved there when I was 2 and left when I was 7. Ten years later, I returned for college. 

The childhood memories are fractured and spare. My brother, Mikey, figured large in them, larger than my sisters being closer to my age. In the 50s haven of a brand new house in the new Skipwith Farms development, when I was four and my brother was nine we played unsupervised outside in the wooded lot next to our house. 

Mikey had a BB gun and hunted birds. I tagged along with what in memory was a dreamlike quiet and floating detachment. We visited the corpses of past kills and he hunted for new ones. I learned the phases of bird decay as they returned to the earth bit by bit. I cannot find the remnant of any thought I had looking at the dead birds. Perhaps I shut my wondering mind because of what I might see. My young self, like my grown self, was small and quick. My voice light and high. I still chatter aimlessly like a bird sometimes. I was a surprise baby and had dethroned the young king at 5, and I suppose his heart still resented what I took from him.

There was my mother’s dog, a Welsh Terrier named Belle. She bit my father once when he was raging at my mother. My father never forgave the dog, even after she chased off an intruder who came with smiling menace into our house while my mother and I were there alone. The sound of Belle’s low growl and her nails scrabbling on the hardwood floor upstairs sent the man out the door in a hurry. My mother adored her but when we moved away, my father insisted we leave her behind. My mother found a farm where the widow doted on her, but still she wept bitterly over leaving Belle behind.

This was the second abandonment my mother agreed to. The first was of my eldest brother, Joe Paul, who had gotten meningitis at six months and the fever fried his brain. Mother spoke of the light dulling in his eyes, of the doctor weeping and telling her he would always be a “vegetable.” She kept J.P. at home, refusing to institutionalize him as a baby. J.P did learn to walk eventually with a lurching gait, canted to one side but upright on his own. He learned to speak and dress and every picture of him shows a happy boy.  We now know it was the institutions that robbed even undamaged children of growth. Certainly, the heroic efforts of my mother allowed him to fill out as much of his potential as remained. By age fourteen he had developed to about a four-year-old level and could speak and walk and dress on his own.

But just before we moved to Williamsburg, at the urging of the family to consider the happiness of her other four children, Mother agreed to have him institutionalized. This was in part because J.P. was entering puberty and my mother was not sure how to handle it. But also because of the times. Handicapped children were not seen or heard of in 1950’s middle-class America, as if they didn’t exist. So the family minus one had packed up and headed south. 

My college years in Williamsburg were, by contrast, a remarkably uninteresting time. I was only 16, vain to have matriculated so young but otherwise having no idea why I was in college. I went because to not go would disappoint my parents. I majored in drama, secure in the expectation that I would be welcomed and nurtured as I had been in high school. The theater department did have its stars, but I was not one of those few students the faculty designated as talented. I did have an amazing year, a period of enormous growth, when I spent my junior year in Montpellier, France. But really, I couldn’t wait to graduate, certain that once I left, I’d never set foot in a classroom again.

For all these layers of personal history in Williamsburg, returning there on my 60th birthday was a hollow experience. The Wonder Bread world of the 50s was as gone as Shakespearean England. I had lived it but could not relive it. The house in Skipwith Farms was stately with age, the wooded bird graveyard had a house on it. As for the people in those memories, only my two sisters remained of my birth family. My anchors to the childhood era - my brother, my parents -had evaporated.

I visited the theater building where I spent most of my undergraduate years. It was too early in the semester for the frenzied preproduction activity that would keep students and faculty there at all hours. I wandered through the empty rehearsal rooms, scanned the walls of photographs from past productions, finding the black and white ones of shows I had been in. They were flat and faded like some Depression Era artifact. 

The theater stage was dark, with only the lone ghost light shining from center stage. Undergraduate school was a time of intense emotional pain for me, no doubt mostly self-inflicted with of the misery of unmet desires. There again, at the remove of decades, I found a null space. It turns out the the residue of misery is nothingness. Emptiness. As if misery eats the years where it lived leaving nothing behind but stolen time. 

It was raining when I walked out in the evening. I drove into Colonial Williamsburg and treated myself to a birthday dinner at Chownings Tavern. The costumed performers, theater students from the college no doubt, played minstrel and server. I ate alone and paid, taking no souvenirs. 

Susan diRende’s writing has received recognition from the Philip K Dick Awards, Artists Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission among others. Her artwork has been in shows in New Zealand, Belgium, Mexico, and the US. Recent publications include The Dewdrop, the Pine Hills Review, and The Gaze Journal. She travels the world with no fixed abode.

Is My Tree Dying or Dead?

 I try to channel the memory
of my ancestors, search
with stunted roots in soil
too virgin to be fertile.
I cannot drink their wisdom
scrape only the surface
of their histories while time
burns our tenuous connection
severs me from the ancient
power of past generations.
A lone branch
on a barren family tree.

Gabby Gilliam lives in the DC metro area. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Tofu Ink Arts Press, Tempered Runes Press, Cauldron Anthology, and the anthology “Medusa Rises'' from Mythos Poets Society. You can find her online at gabbygilliam.squarespace.com.