Widow Writing & Awareness

Lifelong Learning on the Go

The typo is just as accurate as the title. The Dead Folder: My Truce with Grief is complete. Now I just need a publisher. This much is true. But truth is a funny thing. Plato defined knowledge as justified, true belief. But the knowledge that my late (dead, not tardy) husband, Kent, was not here to help me restring the weed wacker doesn’t mean I didn’t turn to ask him about it anyway. I can’t ask him which cover image, out of the eight that the graphic designer created so far, he likes best. Christoph designed the cover for my friend Natasha’s incredible book, The Parts of Him I Kept, so naturally I went to him for The Dead Folder. Leave it to me to have the cover ready before the publisher, since I had the book proposal done before the last chapter was finished. I can do things a bit backward.

But I am still doing things, and that’s what matters now. Although I have my master’s degree and have retired from teaching high school English, writing takes up all my time when I’m not playing with my grandchildren. Even though it’s not in an academic setting, I am always learning. Therefore, a kitchen table MFA it is.

Synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence, is not just a song by Sting’s band, The Police. I was reading Jane Hirshfield’s essential Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, when Marj Hahne assigned the first essay in the book for one of her upcoming webinars. Webinar is not a fulfilling word. One of her salons (as in intellectual gathering, not haircut) would better describe it. Seminar just sounds better than webinar I guess. I know that nothing is better than in-person learning, but Zoom is my friend. I also just finished a great course (online) through the Academy of Intentional Magic with Joshua Davis and Maureen Alsop. I return to these poet/teachers time and again because I always learn, and I always produce. The muse perks up her ears when I’m in a class or seminar or reading. Speaking of readings, Maureen and Wendy Kagan are having a double book launch on Sunday, June 14th, via Zoom. I can’t attend because I will be in Middlebury, Vermont, at the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. I am BEYOND excited to be working with poets like Joseph O. Legaspi. It’s a beautiful world now and then, when you can talk poetry and nature and surround yourself with artists who appreciate awe.

As much as I miss the love of my very existence, I am honored to keep going.

Link to a sestina

published in The Nature of Our Times by Poets for Science.

THOUGH THERE BE FURY by Lisa St. John

The Ocean has its silent caves, / Deep, quiet, and alone; / Though there be fury on the waves, / Beneath them there is none.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne