When Shall We Tell the Children?
Next Thursday at 6:30 pm, please join me IN PERSON for a writing workshop at the beautiful Strathmore Mansion. Tickets are available here. Today is the last day of national poetry month and I’m doing it up big. In the morning I went to a middle school to meet 12 children (a few quite skeptical)…
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What if you knew?
I don’t usually watch serious movies (some people might say that I don’t usually watch good movies, but those people are rude) because I have a hard time with them. I cry a lot, I get confused (a confession reader, please don’t be an asshole). The confusion stems from the fact that I have a hard time watching closely, because half my brain is always somewhere else, thinking about productivity, thinking about the book I should be reading or the email I should be responding to.
Drinking Water & Paying Attention
First, some business. If you’re in NYC, I’d like to see you tomorrow at 7 pm at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg. It is going to be so much fun and I think you like fun. Am I wrong? Don’t you like fun? Here’s a link. I’ve been reading Kim Dower’s new book of poetry, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave,…
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A Community Affair
April 6th at 5:30 pm!!! DC Area friends please please save the date. Maybe you’ll get sick of hearing about this. Maybe you already are. But if you don’t come, I want it to be because you can’t come or don’t want to come. Not because you didn’t know about it. So I’m telling you…
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What it means
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the celebrity review of A Constellation of Half-Lives.* In the video, the celebrity (my mother) says, “Seema, please explain,” and reads a line of the opening poem out loud. It’s very funny, because of course, she turns the “your mother” into a question about my mother which is to…
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Settings
Last night I woke up at 2:30 am, fully fully awake. So I made a cup of tea and read for a few hours under a quilt in the lamplight in my living room. I finished reading Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm, a slim book (that’s been made thicker by my reading, a phenomenon that…
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It’s okay.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the most comfortable-productive outfit for working from home. Look. I can’t always think about war and overcoming grief and how I’m screwing my kids up, okay? Sometimes I have to decide what to wear, knowing that I’m not going out anywhere but it’s not decent to totally give up…
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Pulling versus Pushing
A few weeks ago, I mentioned changes were coming. If you are on social media with me or on CBAW’s mailing list, you’ve likely already seen it. If not, here’s a link to the announcement. It was difficult to write, and doesn’t contain the images that are etched in my memory about this long beautiful…
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Dealing with our parents’ grief
A couple of weeks ago I had a phone call with my friend Joy and we talked about what we’d planned to talk about quite efficiently and then got into the things we wanted to talk about. Poetry and poems and writers we love and writing we love. Before I hung up, I’d ordered another…
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