The Rain in Her Purse

A while ago, I saw on someone's blogroll (I don't recall whose) a blog entitled The Rain in My Purse. I was intrigued; I clicked; I've been following the blog of Sarah J. Sloat intermittently ever since. Her short posts are quirky and inventive and startling.

I haven't checked in recently, but did yesterday to find that Sarah J. Sloat has a new chapbook coming out from Hyacinth Girl Press, entitled Homebodies. I am ordering one as soon as I get word from the publishers about how to handle overseas postage, since it isn't clear from the website, even though Sloat herself lives overseas.

She also has an earlier chapbook out from Dancing Girl Press, called Excuse Me While I Wring This Long Swim Out of My Hair. This publisher doesn't ship internationally, so my copy is sitting at a relatives' house waiting for me to fetch it or for them to send it.

If you are interested in seeing some of Sloat's work, check out these links:

"Training" at Linebreak
two poems at Literary Bohemian
"Our Lady of Busted Cutlery" at Umbrella
"Glass Stairwells" and more (scroll down) at qarrtsiluni

Kabocha Puree

This is the last thing I'll post today, and it's not about poetry, it's about pumpkins, so poets and writers, skip this post. It's for the US expats living in Japan who will have a dilemma when trying to make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving next month.

If you do the Thanksgiving thing, you already know that canned pumpkin has not been available for the past couple of years. I have made my own pumpkin puree using kabocha (the local pumpkin variety) and have tried both using my oven to roast it, and boiling the pumpkin. Both methods worked okay, and I made some super delicious pie based on my sister Jamie's yummy recipe (which I may post later in the month, if there's interest).

Anyway, today I happened upon a culinary blog by an expat in Japan who writes about cooking (called I'll Make it Myself), and her topic here is making kabocha puree. She seems more invested in cooking than I am, so I'm going to follow her recipe this year (which allows both for the baking and the boiling methods). Just thought you'd like to know, if Thanksgiving abroad is a challenge for you too.

(We made our jack-o-lantern last Sunday evening, and good thing we enjoyed it this week, because it totally rotted. We had to toss it this morning, nearly two weeks before Halloween! Darn this global warming that rots jack-o-lanterns more quickly than in my youth!)

kabocha



pumpkin

  

Self-Doubt Remedies

Writer Jon Bard at the blog Write to Done: Unmissable Articles on Writing has a helpful article called "5 Ways for Writers to Blast Through Self-Doubt."

Now, in general I think self-doubt is inherent to writing, and maybe even important to it. I'm not sure I want to get rid of my self-doubt, but I surely want to stop suffering from my self-doubt. Plus this article has a number in its title, and I'm a sucker for numbers in anything. So I had a look and am glad I did.

Here are Bard's main points:

1) Differentiate between being a writer and an author. Writers write to write; authors write to be read. Bard explains how understanding and identifying with this distinction can help you.

2) Bard gives (and cites other sources) for learning to ignore the haters.  He quotes Colin Powell: “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” And Bard emphasizes that writers should focus on how many people really "get" their work, not how many don't.

3) Remember that other writers are more concerned with their work than yours, and that their criticisms/attitudes/lack of interest may reflect that.

4) I'm just going to quote Bard's title for his fourth point: "Attain non-attachment by being prolific." Wow. This is for me. Don't get too attached to one piece of work so that it sucks up all your energy and creativity and you get so invested in it that you can't move on, can't show people for fear of having everything important to you blown sky high, etc. Write more, be attached less.

5) Don't invest entirely in one genre, or your self-identity will get stuck in that. This is more of the non-attachment from part 4, but it's too sophisticated for me. I'm not sure I'm ready for it. But Bard suggests thinking of yourself as a "writer" not a certain kind of writer (as in a poet, but I don't consider myself a poet either, but a person who writes poems. Not exclusively but almost.....I must think about this.....)

Well, read the whole article. It's short and punchy and does a better job explicating its points than I have. And it may help you with self-doubt, if you have any (ha ha, just doubting you have self-doubt for the fun of it. Remember W. S. Merwin's poem about John Berryman's advice to him, quoted in part below:)

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

Line Breaks via Scissors

I've mentioned the P&W weekly e-newsletter, "The Time is Now," before but I'd like to mention it again. It's a brief useful email that gives a poetry writing prompt, a fiction writing prompt, a creative nonfiction (you've guessed it) writing prompt, and a book recommendation regarding the craft of writing. I've learned of plenty of good books and used a few of the prompts myself.

This week's poetry prompt is one I'd heard of before, but forgotten about. Serendipitously, it appeared in my inbox this week just when I was struggling with a poem that might benefit from this freeing technique. I'm going to take my scissors to my poem today and see how it goes.

Here's the prompt.


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Take one of your poems that you're not satisfied with and use scissors to cut it up into its lines. Rearrange the lines, omitting ones that no longer fit. With this fresh arrangement as a working draft, compose an entirely new poem.

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And here's how to sign up for the weekly newsletter. Go to this link, and scroll to the blue sign-up button at the bottom of the page.

Post-Publication Prize Update

I've just added one more post-publication book contest to my original post on the topic, so if you are interested , check out the comments section of this post http://www.jessicagoodfellow.blogspot.jp/2011/04/post-publication-book-contests.html to see the UNT Rilke Prize for mid-career poets, with a large cash award of $10,000.