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THE SUNDAY POSEY: Opportunities, Events and Other Information and News

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CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Opportunity Knocks

INKITT, Story Peak Novel Contest: “Win one of three publishing offers from Inkitt! No submission fees!

“Submit your finished novel, 40,000 words or more – no fan fiction, no other limitations on genre! It’s time to bring your manuscripts into the light and show them off to the world. We are once again looking for three novels to publish!

“The three winners of the StoryPeak² Novel Contest will be determined by Inkitt based on how their novels perform amongst their readership. All authors will be given 100 copies of their novel to distribute to their readers. Authors have a dashboard where they can see how many people have ‘reserved’ their novel and the current level of their readers’ satisfaction.”  Details including terms HERE.  Deadline October 2. 

However: there have been some complaints: Inkitt spam.

THE CITY QUILL celebrates “new writers from all walks of life, no matter their age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, ability, income, weight, height, education level, favorite color, or whatever. If you’re an unpublished writer, we want to hear from you. If you have been published before, we love you, but please don’t send us your work. Your submission will not be read.” Accepts poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Details HERE.

THE BROKEN CITY “is currently accepting submissions for its winter 2016 edition: Life of the Party. We’re looking for work that revolves around parties and celebrations, from the sophisticated to the debaucherous: soirées, shindigs, galas, cotillion balls, beer busts at The Moontower—if someone’s raising a glass, we want to know about it.”  The Broken City (Toronto) publishes poetry, fiction, essays, illustrations and photography. Deadline is: November 1, 2016. Details HERE.

HEADLAND, Literary Frontiers & Emerging Voices accepts submissions year-round. Deadline for Issue 8, closes on 7 October 2016. Publishes short fiction and creative non-fiction, not poetry. Details HERE.

THE McGUFFIN, a publication of Schoolcraft College, accepts poetry, fiction, nonfiction and images. Poetry may be “traditional, formal, free verse, and experimental poetry. Poems can be up to 400 lines. There are no subject biases.” Details HERE. Info on their call for art HERE.

SCHOLARSHIP

Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship established by the American poet Amy Lowell in her will is an annual scholarship to support travel abroad for gifted American-born poets. Deadline October 15. Details HERE.

EVENTS

THE FRENCH CONNECTION 2016, Friday, October 7th, 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street, Chicago. Free admission: “To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the relationship between Chicago and Paris, the Chicago Sister Cities Paris Committee invites Chicago Slam Works to showcase the work of Collective 129H, poets/performers Rouda, Neobled, and Lyor. Together with Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam, and Chicago Slam Works poets, they create a dynamic interpretive performance which can be easily understood, in real time, by both French and English speakers.” Details HERE.

POETRY IN DOWNTOWN BAY SHORE, Long Island, NY, September 10, 7 p.m. Join posts Matt Pasca (The Raven’s Wire) and Terri Muuss (Over Exposed) when they host every second Saturday at Cyrus’ for the kind of poetry, coffee, treats and open mic experience you’ve been looking for!!! Our features will move and inspire you with their honesty and scintillating presence. Open mic follows features, so bring your ukulele, cello, double bass, guitar, sonnets, spoken word, villanelles and more! This gathering will feature LIV MAMMONE and RICHARD JEFFREY NEWMAN. Details HERE.

PAUMANOK POETRY POW WOW, Long Island, New York Saturday, September 17, 12 p.m. – 6 p.m. “The Nassau County Poet Laureate Society and the WWBA invite all the “poetry tribes” from the city’s five boroughs and Long Island for an afternoon of poetry readings from the tribes. There will be music, readings, workshops and refreshments ($10 admission fee).”  Details HERE.

NEIL STEINBERG “A Box Full of Darkness: Poetry, Addiction and Family.”  Thursday, September 8th, 7:00 PM, Steinber reads from his latest book, Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago. Free admission. Details HERE.

13TH ANNUAL PALM BEACH POETRY FESTIVAL is scheduled for January 16-21. (Sounds fabulous!) Details HERE.

PHOTOGRAPHY:

STANFORD PROFESSOR PUTS HIS ENTIRE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY COURSE ONLINE FOR FREE, D/Y Photography

PHOTOGRAPHS, COPYRIGHT GUIDELINES, U.K.

PHOTOGRAPHS, COPYRIGHT GUIDELINES, U.S.

PHOTOGRAPHS, COPYRIGHT GUIDELINES, CANADA

TIDBITS:

VOICES ABOVE THE CHOAS: FEMALE WAR POETS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST, The Guardian

Happy Holiday to everyone celebrating Labor Day and to those in Kerala celebrating Onam.

When Maveli ruled the land,
All the people were equal-
Times when people were joyful and merry;
They were all free from harm.
There was neither anxiety nor sickness,
Deaths of children were unheard of,
No wicked person was in sight anywhere
All the people on the land were good.
There was neither theft nor deceit,
And no false words or promises.
Measures and weights were right;
There were no lies,
No one cheated or wronged his neighbor.
When Maveli ruled the land,
All the people formed one casteless race

Thiruvathira_Kali_During_Onam

Photograph in the pubic domain. Photo and poem courtesy of Wikipedia.

THE POET BY DAY SUNDAY POESY

Submit your event, book launch and other announcements at least fourteen days in advance to thepoetbyday@gmail.com. Publication is subject to editorial discretion.

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POET, PLAYWRIGHT AND AUTHOR, Joyce Carol Thomas died

Joyce Carol Thomas, (1938-2016), poet, playwright and the author of more than 30 books for children and youth
Joyce Carol Thomas, (1938-2016), poet, playwright and the author of more than 30 books for children and youth

Joyce Carol Thomas was one of nine children born into a cotton-picking family in rural Oklahoma. She died last month on the 16th in Berkeley, California.

Ms. Thomas started out writing poetry and plays and then moved on to young adult fiction. Her first young adult novel,  Marked by Fire, was published in 1982 and won the National Book Award in 1983.

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She said in one interview, “I know of black boys and girls who squirm uncomfortably in their desks at the two-dimensional, unrelenting portrayal of young people as either victims of slavery or perennial do-rag wearers hanging out on a stoop next to a garbage can. There are black American stories somewhere between slavery and ghetto that also deserve telling.” Her work explored issues of identity and the experience of black lives in rural areas.

In addition to the National Book Award, she won the American Book Award, the New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year Award, Outstanding Woman of the 20th Century Award, three Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, the Center for Poets and Writers’ Poet Laureate Award, Kirkus Reviews Editors’ Choice, the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, Book of the Month Club Selection, and others.  She received her undergraduate degree from San Jose State and a master’s from Stanford University and taught at several colleges.

Because I am dark, the moon and stars shine brighter.”

Her poetry collections included The Blacker the Berry and Brown Honey in Broom Wheat Tea, which both received the Coretta Scott King Book Award.

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When the berries in the jar
Are biscuit ready
I fix a cup of tea
Then spoon out biscuit jelly
For biscuit brown me
Joyce Carol Thomas

With the holiday’s coming sooner than we’d like to think: her books make great gifts for children and youth. Her board books are charming.

Photograph, courtesy of Ms. Thomas’ Amazon page.

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CELEBRATING AMERICAN SHE POETS (26): May Sarton … when poet becomes woman, “Sisters, My Sisters”

May Sarton (1912-1995), American poet, memoirist and novelist
May Sarton (1912-1995), American poet, memoirist and novelist

“The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the “creative” is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.”  May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

Eleanore Marie Sarton – nom de plume, May Sarton – was born in Ghent in Belgium to an English portrait-artist and interior-designer mother, Mabel Eleanor Elwes, and George Alfred Leon Sarton, a chemist and historian renown as the father of science history.

When the German invasion of Belgium began in August 1914 the family escaped to Mabel Sarton’s mother’s home in Ipswich, England. From there they traveled to America and settled in Boston so George Sarton could teach at Harvard University. May came from a family of gentle nonconformists and her maternal grandfather was among the original Fabians.

“Perhaps every true poem is a dialogue with God … when we are able to write a poem we become for a few hours part of Creation itself.” May Sarton in The Practice of Two Crafts, Christian Science Monitor (1974)

51ryhQbcxtL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_May Sarton’s parents did not belong to any church but she seemed to feel that her parent’s views were not inconsistent with those of the Unitarian Church.

Interviewed in The World in 1987, she told Michael Finley, “My father and mother believed that, though Jesus was not God, he was a mighty leader, and the spirit of Jesus, the logos of him, is the worship of God and the spirit of man.

“At the age of ten May was introduced to the Unitarian church by her neighborhood friend Barbara Runkle, whose family attended the First Parish in Cambridge. May was impressed by the minister, Samuel McChord Crothers, whose sermons she thought “full of quiet wisdom.” One sermon in particular, she recalled in her memoir At Seventy, 1984, “made a great impression on me—and really marked me for life. I can hear him saying, ‘Go into the inner chamber of your soul—and shut the door.’ The slight pause after ‘soul’ did it. A revelation to the child who heard it and who never has forgotten it.” The Encyclopedia of Unitarian and Universalist Biography

May began writing early and her first poems – sonnets – were published in Poetry magazine in 1930. Her other love was theatre and she abandoned a scholarship to Vassar to study theatre and to eventually found  a theatre company. However, in I Knew a Phoenix, Sketches for an Autobiography she wrote that when her first collection was published she focused on writing and “never looked back.”

Her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears Mermaids Singing is considered a “coming out” book and her work was then labeled lesbian and featured in women’s studies classes. She regretted the label seeing it as limiting, which it is.  May Sarton wrote about the experiences, fears and other emotions that are part of being human. Journal of Solitude, for example, is a meditation on aging and the changes aging brings to life, on solitude ( a frequent theme in her work), on love affairs and creativity. May Sarton’s true gifts are poetry and memoir and not to be missed. Her novels – as she knew and admitted – were good but not top-notch.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”  May Sarton, Journey of Solitude

The following poem, Sisters, My Sisters, is one of May Sarton’s most well know poems. She reads it herself in this video. It was originally published in Kenyon Review in 1943 and is in Selected Poems of May Sarton.

If you are reading this in email, you’ll likely have to link through to the site to view it.

cover57866-medium“Nous que voulions poser, image ineffaceable
Comme un delta divin notre main sur le sable”
– Anna de Noaille

Dorothy Wordsworth, dying, did not want to read,
“I am too busy with my own feelings,” she said.

And all women who have wanted to break out
Of the prison of consciousness to sing or shout

Are strange monsters who renounce the measure
Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure.

Dickinson, Rossetti, Sappho — they all know it,
Something is lost, strained, unforgiven in the poet.

She abducts from life or like George Sand
Suffers from mortality in an immortal hand,

Loves too much, spends a whole life to discover
She was born a good grandmother, not a good lover.

Too powerful for men: Madame de Stael. Too sensitive:
Madame de Sevigne, who burned where she meant to give

Delicate as that burden was and so supremely lovely,
It was too heavy for her daughter, much too heavy.

Only when she built inward in a fearful isolation
Did any one succeed or learn to fuse emotion

– May Sarton, excerpt from Selected Poems of May Sarton (recommended)

***

“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude 

© portrait, Don Cadoret; poem, Sarton estate

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the smell of wood, the scorch of fire, a poem … and Your Wednesday Writing Prompt

stumpsthis rough-barked sequoia stump, sitting in majesty
in its coastal home, victim of wildfire, burned down
to its gnarly roots, its nicks, holes and char, eons
of scars, life seemingly cut off, goddess snake alive
inside the concentric circles, the smell of wood and
scorch of fire, at the verge of our infinity, in its truth ~

pristine

rugged

pulsing

haunted by the geometry of limbs, the calculus of green,
the algebraic eloquence of a world within a world  ~

So present.

So essential.

So primal.

it sings to itself in the marrow of our bones

– Jamie Dedes

WRITING PROMPT

In preparation for The BeZine 100,000 Poets (and Friends) for Change

Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016

Theme: Environment/Environmental Injustice

This poem was originally written in 2014 for Wilderness Week. There were then and are now a number of fires raging in the western United States. Wildfires are a natural occurrence but since the 1980s they’ve been increasing due to human-caused climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists . . .

Wildfires in the western United States have been . . . occurring nearly four times more often, burning more than six times the land area, and lasting almost five times as long (comparisons are between 1970-1986 and 1986-2003) ….. many of the areas that have seen these increases—such as Yosemite National Park and the Northern Rockies—are protected from or relatively unaffected by human land-use and behaviors. This suggests that climate change is a major factor driving the increase in wildfires.” MORE

We tend to look at these fires in terms of the expense incurred fighting them and the cost of lives, homes, habitat, wild life and so forth. However, there’s one consideration we may forget: Nature teaches us, comforts us, feeds us and is the ebb and flow of our spiritual and physical lives. The loss – the environmental injustice – is profound on more than a material level. This is what the smell of wood, the scorch of fire seeks to illustrate. “Nature” is who we are. Nature is us.

Write a poem or creative nonfiction piece on what the natural environment means to you and perhaps the sense of loss you feel as you note plants, animals, insects and wilderness that you’ve seen damaged or destroyed by climate, industry, overpopulation and whatever else has effected the area in which you live.

© 2014, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit ~Bay Nature.org: “The Bay Nature Institute, based in Berkeley, California, is dedicated to educating the people of the San Francisco Bay Area about, and celebrating the beauty of, the surrounding natural world. We do so with the aim of inspiring residents to explore and preserve the diverse and unique natural heritage of the region, and of nurturing productive relationships among the many organizations and individuals working towards these same goals.” Read more HERE.

You are invited to join The Bardo Group Beguines at The BeZine blog on Saturday, September 24 for 100,000 Poets (and friends) for Change.  Below is a list of more features to provide you with information. We hope you’ll join us.

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