Meant to post this on Monday, but I got sick this week, which knocked me flat for several days. Since I’m starting to feel better, I’m posting it now.
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Last Thursday night I attended the fantastic Cito.FAME.Us Women’s History Month open mic, which featured the amazing folk duo Q&A and yours truly. I’ve been a fan of Q&A ever since I first heard them and so it was a great honor to have been paired with them for my first feature performance. I made a video of one of their new songs and hopefully I’ll be able to upload and share it soon.
Q&A includes Quynh and Alice
I also attended the Her Story to Call Her Own open mic, which was a wonderful grounding experience, full of many beautiful women singing or speaking many beautiful words.
What I’m Reading
I just finished Midwinterblood, by Marcus Sedgwick, which was beautiful and not at all what I expected.
Blue by George Elliott Clarke, which is a powerful collection of poetry.
Still enjoying my slow read of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
What I’m Writing
I made it halfway through a chapbook submission, which I’m starting to feel fairly solid about. I’ve got some more work to do on it, some cleaning up of some of the poems and than I should be able to send it out.
Goal(s) for this week: Finish and submit chapbook.
What’s Inspiring Me Right Now
Amazing women and artists who live in this South Bay community and who open up their voices to share.
My sister and I rocked the She is Beautiful 10K, both of us running the entire course for the first time.
I ran the She is Beautiful 5K last year, which was an amazing and moving experience. I just loved being surrounded by so many different women, of all shapes and sizes and abilities and ages — and all beautiful.
This year I decided to up my game and challenged myself by signing up for the 10K. Life has been hectic this month, so I haven’t been properly training over these last few weeks as I originally intended. I didn’t think I’d be able to run the entire event, but was joyful to just be there.
Mile One: The morning was misty, but not overly cold. My sister and I danced through the starting line and started into a stable, steady pace as we weaved through the crowds of walkers.
Mile Two: We smiled at our fellow runners. I felt strong, moving with this massive wave of women through the streets of Santa Cruz. My sister moves out ahead and I urge her on to run at her own faster pace.
Mile Three: The crowds thin out as the 5K runners and walkers head back to the finish line, leaving the rest of us to continue the journey. I wipe sweat and mist from my forehead and smile.
Mile Four: The tiredness started to set in and my pace slowed. But I pumped my arms and cheered as I past the mile four marker. I made it that far; might as well keep going.
Mile Five: As I rounded a corner and started into the only downhill section of the run, my legs got wibbly wobbly and my knees started to ache sharply. It’s important to respect signals from your body, so I slowed down to a walk. As soon as the ground flattened out again, I pushed back into a run and chugged up a long uphill stretch before the final mile.
Mile Six: Slow, so slow. Exhaustion sat my chest, urging me to stop. My legs felt numb. My hips ached. I churned my body forward at a tortoise-paced jog, watching the grey rolling ocean and the horizon beyond. I put one foot after another. One foot. Another.
Finish Line: I wore a mad smiled and shifted into a higher gear, finishing the race with every ounce of run I had left, with my sister cheering and joy in every fiber of my aching body. My sister and I were so proud of each other, both having run a 10K in its entirety for the first time.
What I’m Reading
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, which is intriguing and thrilling. A group of colonists living on another planet (I think) were infected with a disease that killed all the women and has made it so everyone can hear everyone’s thoughts in a constant stream of Noise. I’m finding it to be a page turner.
I’ve also started a slow read of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The story is quite funny at some points with a surprising amount of toilet humor. Since a lot of the humor is based on the book’s satire of courtly romances featuring errant knights and damsels and other such things, it helps that I’ve done some reading of the classic Arthurian tales, which provides good context.
What I’m Writing
Half of my week was taken up with traveling to Orlando for a work conference, so I didn’t get around to actually putting words on the page.
However, I spent several hours this weekend beginning the process of organizing my writing life. The system I developed should work — mostly. Paper drafts of all my poetry is problematic, since it would be ridiculous to have an individual file for each poem, so I’m still trying to work that out (and likely it will be best to keep poetry primarily on my laptop rather than in print). Works great for fiction, scripts, and nonfiction, though. I’m planning to post about the system sometime this week.
Goal(s) for this week: Finish organization. Edit and prep poetry for reading on Thursday. Prep poetry chapbook for submission.
What’s Inspiring Me Right Now
Accomplishing my goal of running six miles on Sunday was amazing and has me feeling that I can accomplish all sorts of things at the moment. I’m hoping that feeling will linger.
Where I’ll Be
March 26: I’ll be a featured performer at Cito.FAME.us at Iguanas in San Jose. The open mic begins at 9 pm and I’ll be opening, so come early, if you want to see me perform.
Linky Goodness
21 Ways to Break Out of a Slump provides a list of simple measures to switch things up, like heading out to the farmers market or do a cell phone detox. I particularly liked its link to a 30 Day Spring Cleaning Challenge, which would be a challenge indeed, but represents an awesome approach to something I’ve been meaning to do.
The 2014 Best of the Net Anthology has been released for those looking for some good fiction, poetry, and nonfiction reading.
My weekend was filled with FOGcon and I’m pleasantly exhausted. It’s always a blast to go, reconnect with friends, and talk about speculative fiction and movies and other geekery. This year I also did karaoke for the first time and despite my pounding heart had quite a lot of fun.
One especially interesting thought, for me, was the idea that nested stories reflect how life works, in that we are the center of our own stories and our lives are filled with interjections and asides, from the gossip we tell a friend to the stories we relate about ourselves to the wikipedia article we pause to look up in the middle of a conversation. We are constantly stopped by interjecting narrative and it was even suggested that we are the frame narrative for every book we read.
For writers, it was noted that nested stories can sometimes be an engaging way to slip in exposition, reveal layers to the world, or characterization. However, the story needs to be just as compelling as the main (frame) narrative. Since it is interrupting the narrative flow, the first line of the interjected story had better be better than what came before it so that it doesn’t turn readers away. It was also noted that some nested stories work better as fragments instead of complete tales.
Notable book recommendations: The French Lieutenants Woman, by John Fowles Was, by Geoff Ryman Order of the Stick, comic by Rich Burlew
Cito.FAME.Us celebrated it’s first Valentines Day party last night, with pink and red paper hearts and little chocolates for all — not to mention an amazing crew of artists, including poets, musicians, and some smooth moved dancers. Love of many forms was expressed and shared.
Chris Quality handed out his Lyrical Fitness album at the event.
Our Hella Famous host, Lindsey Leong, shared a moving, deeply felt poem. It always amazes me how she can hold such a safe space for everyone who comes to her events. She’s an amazing poet and such a wonderful soul.
Chris Quality is a fantastic hip hop artist. He helped plan the event along with Lindsey, and is another generous soul. Each time I’ve seen him, he’s just been one of the happiest people I’ve met. He handed flowers out to all the ladies (and some gentlemen) with the help of Mohamed X, who also rocked the mic last night.
A stunning song came from the lips of the beautiful Miachalah, who I hope I will get to see perform more in the future.
Mc Tate performed a series of amazing spoken work pieces, that had my head spinning trying to cling to some of his wicked phrases and metaphors. I hope he publishes a collection soon, so I can have those words on my shelf, where I can look at them anytime I want.
The always delightful Q&A performed several sweet folksy songs. They get better and better every time I hear them, which was especially impressive since Quinn was feeling sick last night.
Melissa Baxter was taking photographs of the performers all night long and also belted out a best friends song from the Wicked musical.
I also want to send love to Lorenz Dumuk, who didn’t perform last night, but helped to set up the fantastic back drops and sets for the show. Hugs to you, friend.
Amid all these fantastic artists and wonderful people, it was an honor to be able to share one of my poems, a piece I wrote especially for the event, called “As a Single Lady Alone on Valentines Day” (which I’ll be submitting for publication as soon as I make some edits). I was grateful for the positive feedback to be able to just be there and share in the experience.
PS. I want to be able to help promote the performers with this post, so itf there is anyone who performed who I forgot to add here, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add you to the list.
Last Friday night was lovely. I attended Glowing with the Moon, an open mic hosted by my amazing, wonderful poet friend, Lorenz Dumuk. Lorenz is an amazing poet and one of the kindest, most generous-hearted people I know.
The night included a mix of featured poets and open mic participants with a variety of styles, including Yvette McDonald, Lindsey Leong, Scorpiana Xlynn, and others. The out pouring of words as the sky darkened into night was wonderful.
Q&A also performed a couple of sets. The musical duo is comprised of Quynh Nguyen and Alice D. Chen. They play a mixture of covers and original music in a style that is sweet and slightly eerie. They don’t have a website or facebook page that I can link to yet, but they have definitely made a groupie of me.
Lorenz presented several lovely counterparts to the mixture of spoken word and music:
He asked everyone to participate in a salt-art table, to draw out our dreams or what we’re looking to let go off in salt, then to sweep it into a bag, which he will later take and return to the ocean.
At another point, he asked everyone to stand up and greet a stranger, saying our name, what we hoped to call to ourselves, and what fears we wanted to let go of — the result was an opening up to someone new, perhaps letting in a little vulnerability along the way.
Since it was that kind of night, Lorenz also asked us to close our eyes and listen to the wind singing in hushed tones in the trees around us.
I don’t know that I can properly explain how grounding and wonderful a night Friday was and what a great community these artists and poets are. I find myself sometimes longing for community of this kind, a creatively charged group casting their words into the world (I do have my Writing Gang, though life has intervened making it hard for us to gather). Such kinds of communities makes me feel alive to words.
As I usually do after such an event, I went home and threw some words down on a poem I’ve been working on for a while. There’s going to be another open mic at Iguanas in San Jose on Thursday. My goal is to finish this poem in time to read it at the Thursday open mic, which is intimidating since this poem makes me feel vulnerable writing it, let alone reading it out loud to others.
I hope everyone is having a lovely week, full of creativity and joy.
