Interactive, Multimedia NaPoWriMo 2024
For the last few years I’ve been thinking about the final NaPoWriMo project as something poets could do together. I also wanted to organize something with a multimedia aspect and so over the last few years I came up with categories like recipes, books. playlists, scavenger hunts, maps and postcards. Then I came up with a theme of “childhood things,” both things we should keep and things we should let go of.
So each day of this month (or for 30 days should I get behind), we’ll be exploring poems based on these kinds of mini-projects.
Materials you may need to complete the projects:
- a phone camera (if you want to memorialize your little scavenger hunt assemblages ((spoiler alert: there will be scavenger hunt assemblages)),
- Access to recipes, books and objects you loved as a child (you can find similar items online if you don’t have access to childhood things)
- Paper to draw maps.
- 5 postcards.
- A tiny little notebook.
- Optional: A Youtube or streaming music account
C
hildhood Comfort Foods
(April 1, 2022)
Step One: find a comfort-food recipe from your childhood. Think about the recipe, your memories of it and what you like about it.
My recipe is my mother’s burrito sauce recipe. We have a saying in New Mexico, “bred on red, weaned on green.” This means red sauce and green sauce (both derivative of the New Mexico green chile) are part of our very essence, the sauce is in our blood almost literally. When I was a baby, one of the things my mother found frustrating was my disinterest in baby food or milk. She asked our pediatrician, (a real 1970s-Dr. Spock-type iconoclast), what she should do about this. The doctor said to feed me what the rest of the family was eating. This was Mexican food. My mother was like, alright. She wasn’t raised with Mexican food. She was raised on the coast of Oregon, but she had completely embraced the Albuquerque culinary culture. I can still see eating chips and salsa at that Albuquerque kitchen table as a very early memory and for many years my birthday dinner request was for my mother’s refried bean burritos (she normally put pork or beef in them but made a vegetarian version for me) topped with her singular burrito sauce. I didn’t go so far as to make the recipe today and so the picture above looks nothing like it. My mother’s has an orange tinge more in line with southern-Colorado red sauce.
As for my father who was raised in New Mexico and Arizona, trying spicy food was a test of one’s bravery. To do these feats I probably already knew I needed a lot of practice and should get started on it as a little baby.
Step Two: rewrite the recipe. Try to make it mythical and metaphorical. Think about the food in your mouth.
Form and Fire
I did not want formula or forms,
milk or rice or honey.
I wanted my mother’s expertise
in my father’s culinary land.I wanted disbanded pinto beans
made into mud, clay from a sacred spot,
a family place, a vortex,
a road cut.The adobe wall of tortilla,
the kind of surface that undulates
in time and under fingers.A sprinkle of holy flour.
Garlic and butter for the flag.Then root onions, white or yellow or green,
husked from the darkness of the hull.The blood of a tomato.
Roasted chile skinned raw.Simmering, seething desert pirates,
evaporated offerings, the angel’s cut.The bravado of the buccaneer.
All those tongues lost in the fire.
Only the bravest of the brave
refused the milk and kept their flaming souls.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about the poem you’ve just written. Hand write in the tiny book two things: (1) one thing you need to find from your childhood and (2) one thing you need to lose.
Step One: create a list of book titles you particularly like, not for the content in the book, but just for the sound of the titles, or for what the titles connotate out of context.
I think about titles a lot. My mentor at the University of Missouri, Howard Schwartz, used to have us labor over them in his workshops, especially the articles. What if you change this “the” to an “a”? Or would it be better without an/the article at all?
Good questions to ask all your sentences and titles.
Step Two: rewrite a poem ruminating on a few of those titles in your list. Pay heed to transitions as you move from ruminating on one title to the next. Try to connect your ideas together instead of jumping around from title to title.
A Genuine Article
I can never remember if the book is called
Death Comes to the Archbishop
or Death Comes for the Archbishop;
and it’s the difference between something
that just happens upon the guy,
like finding the Reaper at a four-way stop,
and something respectfully coming
directly on his behalf, God’s own
personal dispatch.You see, the little words
are the most menacing ones
which is why any title as a tiny list
can sound so severe.
For example, I’m always tripping
over The Beautiful and Damned.
Shouldn’t it be The Beautiful
and the Damned,
just for the music of it
and to imply there could be two buckets
and your journey is to figure out
if they are, in fact, two buckets
or really just one?Or like The Quick and the Dead,
which is a movie but a good example
of a list meaning either or,
you are either quick or you are dead
gunslinger speaking.The Sound and the Fury,
those things go hand-in-hand.
You got your sound, you got your fury.The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
a seemingly random list that asks
what do these things have in common?We have to mind our Ps and Qs,
our buts and ands
because there is the thing
and there is one of many:
The Importance of Being Earnest,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
A Wrinkle in Time.If there is one, is there more than one?
Maybe we step outside the matrix of specificity
and ask a question, Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?Or have the article tell a joke, Go the Fuck to Sleep,
or slam the gavel and proliferate Requiems for everything,
or draw a line in the sand, Everyone Poops.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about what a title for a book about your childhood would be, (say the story ends at age 13). Come up with three titles, one funny (like “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”), one serious (like “For Whom the Bell Tolls”) and one that’s a little bit weird or vague (like “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”).
The Playlist of Your Name
(April 3, 2022)
Step One: create a song list on paper or on a CD or cassette tape or on a streaming service containing songs with your first name in the title. Don’t go as far as to searching song lyrics. You can search for such things but then your playlist could get impossibly long depending upon how common your name is. Maybe leave that for another playlist.
I made this mix a few years ago in preparation for this challenge, starting off with a compilation of comedic-actress Jackée Harry saying “Mary” from episodes of the show 227. Back in the late 1990s, a friend in New York used to only address me as Jackée would. It gave the name I never liked much a sense of levity.
I’ve done a few name-mixes for birthdays over the years and one of the best things about the search is finding great deep-catalogue songs and rare gems from unexpected and sometimes obscure artists.
Step Two: write a poem contemplating how you hear your own name or someone from your childhood using your name.
Our Flag Means Sweet
“Oh Mary. Sweet, sweet Mary.”
— Jerry B., my father’s 1970s IBM boss upon seeing me 40-years laterMary of the Gods, Mary of the Lambs,
Mary of the dissentions (just for the hell of it),
Mary of the appeals for dead letters and lost causes.Mary’s soft-footed models, (Mary Richards):
Mary of the fawning smile, waifish Mary,
Mary of teetering irrelevance, the thin-voice of us.Not hefty like Marge and all the names I tried on
like M.E., Emmy, Mary Elizabeth
which was mother’s original intention
so I would sound southern. Instead,
everyone just thought I was Catholic.Flowers of Mary on a long yucca bloom
shooting up from the spiked, green leaves
which are the real thing, the basket
before it is the basket.The name is an empty basket
but for all it can hold,
the sign and not the signified,
the flag, not the ship.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about what your parents were thinking when they gave you a name. If you like your name, write down some short statement of appreciation for your parents thinking up your name. If you don’t like your name, (and I suspect many of us are here), write down two or three short arguments you would have presented to your parents if you could, say, time travel and they would have afforded you any input.
Childhood Things
(April 4, 2022)
Step One: assemble together from your home five physical objects from your childhood that you still keep or cherish, even mentally if not physically. You can use Internet photos if you have no access to your old kid things. Take a photo or create a collage.
The big brown bear came from the St. Louis department store Stix Baer & Fuller and I got really attached to it. The needlepoint pillow I did with my grandmother Ladd (she did all the hard parts) while I stayed at her apartment a few hours after piano lessons. She was trying to teach me needlepoint. This was the first and last needlepoint I ever did, but I cherish all her needlepoints (and my other grandmother’s needlepoints), this one most of all for having shared in its making. The Cabbage Patch doll evokes for me an image of my mother during the Cabbage Patch craze standing out in a trucking warehouse where she worked, smoking a cigarette and casually plucking the box from the shelves while mothers across the city were scrambling through Targets trying to snare one for their daughters. The books and two porcelain angels were on my dresser all through my childhood, probably placed there by my mother. I think the brown one might even have been my father’s childhood book. Once in a while I would leaf through them (the orange one mostly for the pictures) and think, this poetry stuff is impossible!
Step Two: write a poem about one or all of the five things. Bring them all together if you can.
Browning
These were the first poems, all.
Play with status and wisdom
and the plush embrace.But I have not taken care
of myself.And the damage shows
in stains, a smile unsewn,
matting at the heart.But the bear’s eye
still reflects the light.
The tree is still blooming.
The words are still there.
The past is still twinkling,
flowering, meaning.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about something from your childhood that you got rid of that you wish you still had. Write it down and why you miss it.
Map to the Heart of Your House
(April 5, 2022)
Step One: sketch or diagram a map of your childhood house. Or if you prefer, sketch a map of another childhood space. Or create an imaginative map for your inner child.
I love maps. I’d have a map room if I could. I love maps of states I’ve lived in, old family town maps, historical maps, maps in the front matter of books, (no respectable fantasy novel would be published without the map of the journey), treasure maps, architectural schematics. I never played Dungeons and Dragons but once with my brother and his friends and the best part of it for me was that map, the map the Dungeon Master created from his own imagination before the game even started, the map that came into view slowly as the game was played and the players made their way forward.
Step Two: write a poem about your map or a location somewhere deep in the map.
The Portal
The secret passageway in the haunted house,
behind the staircase, beyond the bookcase,
the portal to where the writing is
has to be found in every house.To find it you will need a quest of the place;
you will need to sit in every room
with pen and paper, feeling around for the muse,
for where words are shimmering.No one can draw it for you,
no one can tell you where.
It’s something only you can find
days and days into the maze.The house will never change
in one-hundred years;
but you will change
and the key will change.
The X will change.And you have to find it
over and over again.
It’s where your heart is
calling from distant rooms.Just keep turning left.
It will take a while.
But eventually
you will get out.
You will get in.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about a secret passageway somewhere from your childhood, either one you knew about or one you invented. Name it and draw a tiny map.
Dear Dead Relative
(April 6, 2022)
Step One and Two: grab a real postcard (or a virtual one) and write a short message to a dead relative, parents, grandparents, anyone from your real or adopted family tree.
This will be the poem so you can create line breaks or you can make it look like a short postcard paragraph.
The point is to be brief, almost like a telegram. And to realize postcards go through the public mail service wide-open so you want to make it cryptic while still maintaining a personal message. You are talking to the dead, after all. You don’t want to waste their time. Make it meaningful. Send them a message that at least they should understand.
I used to have a ton of blank postcards but I recently threw a lot of them out, mostly ones I picked up years ago in postcard stands outside of New York stores and venues. They were free, after all, but were mostly advertisements with little utility as reusable postcards.
This is one I kept from Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, a place near Boston that I used to love to go. For some reason, I am fascinated by old school rooms, too.
I made many drafts of short messages to my grandmother that all seemed somehow wrong. I had to ask myself what it was I wanted to say to her today. What was the important message today?
Dear Grandma,
Step Three: take your tiny little book and elaborate on your message. The little book is private but little. Breathe a bit more into your message there.
Step One: find a recipe you make yourself that has a kind of ritual attached to it, a kind of recipe that takes you to an almost spiritual place and quite possibly is a magic food. How did this recipe come to do that for you? How old is the recipe? How long have you been making it? Under what circumstances do you make it? Think about how it makes you feel.
When I was living in Boston for a short time before I moved down to Yonkers, New York, my sister-in-law then, Maureen, was taking me to a weekend potluck with her co-workers. (By the way, Maureen is in the Guinness Book of World Records for helping design the fastest computer chip or something like that). Anyway, before we left she taught me how to make my brother Andrew’s guacamole recipe. She said everyone was afraid of it so the best part of taking it to parties was bringing most of it back home. I thought this was a genius life hack. And aside from taking it to New Mexican, Arizonian or Californian parties and potlucks, in other states of America this fiendish scheme works every time.
For some reason I never make guacamole for myself. I’m always making it for a festive occasion or a communal event. I think that’s why it feels so ritualistic for me. It implies other people or a holiday.
Step Two: rewrite the recipe in a way that describes the recipe’s spellbinding qualities.
Poem disclaimer: I do believe in medicine, by the way. Just not for guacamole.
We Must Perish
The dish must perish.
You cannot purchase its longevity.You must chop the thin scallions
like a monk,slice the wet strips of chile,
gingerly segment a jalapeñoand grind the concoction
with garlic and salt and zeal.This is the savor of piquant,
the prayer of tongues,the pious smell
of the dark green core.You must carve the avocado
out of its peel with devotionand with all your fingers.
You must unbury the seed.You must mash the pulp
in a working meditation.Mix the light and the dark greens.
Plop in the seed.You must be in it,
perishable.We must not prop it up with solvents
to stay its untimely death.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and think about a magic charm this food would or does cast. Write it down.
Step One: Find a book with a character you can’t forget. This can be a fictional character or a character ostensibly portrayed as nonfiction. Think about what it is about that character that sticks to you. Chances are there’s something about the character you both like and dislike. Chances are there’s something that nags you about them. Think about both things.
One of the characters I keep coming back to is Hadley, Ernest Hemmingway’s first wife in his memoir about life in Paris in the 1920s. I bought my English copy of A Movable Feast at a bookstore on the Left Bank not far from where Hadley and Ernest lived. I was staying in a hotel down the road and across the street. The character sticks to me for many reasons: 1) I kept walking that street for about a week thinking about them, 2) this was an exciting time for American writers to be in Paris and 3) Hemmingway seems touchingly nostalgic about this time in his life. But Hemmingway was a famously, willfully unreliable narrator about his own life. So what Hadley do we have here? Certainly not Hadley’s version of Hadley. Her version of herself is lost to literature. And this leads me to wonder about the boundaries of people in the world. in literature and in relationships.
Hadley was also married to a personality, a man who wanted to create an impression of his own life. And this brings up a common dilemma for woman who find themselves having to seek permission to describe their own lives. This can take many forms and the pressure to be quiet can start all the way back to childhood with family agendas, secrecy, gaslighting…
Nobody living in this public work owns their own story completely, but certainly you are afforded the right to testify as a witness to it.
Hadley nags me, too, because she never really comes to life in Hemmingway’s version. She seems faint and incapacitated. Is that Hemmingway’s failure to draw her, his own revisionist history or something about Hadley herself? I think this mystery pokes at my own reticence.
Step Two: write a poem that explores your feelings about this character.
Hadley’s Rebuttal
In Hadley’s book, Papa is the character
who falls way, who overspends his telling,
the character she leaves homemaking
for the racetrack jockeys, the man she leaves
to write about bloodthirsty fashion shows
in Brazil, the end of a string of enthusiasts
she leaves for the snowy compound
in Alberta, boating down to Michigan
to fish for book sales.Hadley’s Hadley decides what to tell,
Hadley’s sentences are long and indoors.Hadley’s Hadley remembers life
when it was about to take off
into the nameless unknown,
how quaint and frugal they were,
how happy in that unhappy sort of way.“Such was the Paris we had,” she declares,
bogarting the story with a cocky hat,
with the big white hunter’s way
with pork and ham,
“the Paris of which we’ll always have.”
Step Three: take your tiny little book and send a secret message to your character.
Hom
etown Playlist
(April 9, 2022)
Step One: create a playlist of songs that mention the place where you were born or the place where you grew up or, if you moved around a lot, the place that means something to you from your childhood.
My friend Kalisha and I started trading New Mexico songs with each other about five years ago. We each created our own playlists. I was surprised how many songs there were. And what variety.
I like to hear people talk about their childhood places. A lot of us remember the pleasant aspects of our home places. (In Harding County, New Mexico, homesteaders bought squarish lots for ranching which they would call pastures. The house lot was called “the home place.” You’d go out to so-in-so’s “home place.”)
I’m actually writing this from the junction of a heartbreaking episode in my own family story. And times like this I really appreciate how complicated the home place is, how tricky our family histories are. Some of our inheritances are treasures, some are undertows.
Back in the 1970s, we had our little weekend idyll up from Albuquerque into the Jemez mountains where we would picnic and fish with our mirror family. It’s in my head as one of the most perfect, peaceful places I’ve even been. But on the dark side, as a child I had a recurring dream that our family station wagon would be driving up the mountain and the car would stop along the side of the road and the family would talk me into getting out of the car, ostensibly to grab some flowers, and then the car would drive off leaving me there alone. And after I grew up I found out I wasn’t the only one in my family who had this dream.
So, yeah, it’s complicated. I’ve been bent over the years to look at the bright side: “well, at least I was abandoned in a beautiful place.”
And in defensiveness of my place, Albuquerque has a representation for being somewhat “gritty.” I’m often asked about the crime. Oh, the crime! (It’s a lot of property crime.) Yeah, okay…hold my beer. I spent my later-childhood in St. Louis where we were battling Detroit every year to be listed as the murder capital of the United States. I can handle a bit of grit, thanks. But as you like, it’s rough. It takes stones to live here.
Step Two: write a poem about your complicated, cherished home place.
Dysfunctional Landscape
Driving through on a highway, it might seem
like an idyll and the way we tell it,
glamourous and sweeping,the crescendos of rock and sky,
the maestoso of the people’s pride
down to the pianissimo
of rock and gravel and rain.But then again, the hills are crawling
with outlaws, melodramatic with motives,
mean eyes and their bullshit gunfights.Turn a wrong corner on the high plains
and you’re in yet another duel
with some horse-opera idea.How bright the sun shines
on the red, red blood
as it percolates into dirt.Invariably, you’re the last to know
you’re the mark. You’ve been hit
in a foolish, foolish place.Oh well.
You can’t win ’em all.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down three talisman objects from your place landscape.
Step One: create an assemblage of five gifts that were given to you. Take a picture of your assemblage. Don’t grab things like diamonds, gold and cars. Find smaller things. I almost included something of mine that was more “a gift from the universe” or an accidental gift (a letter from poet John Berryman stuck in a used book I ordered last year). But that’s not really the point of this either. The objects should be intentional gifts given to you by someone who wanted you to have this particular thing. So this also excludes inherited stuff.
This is what I pulled together walking around this morning. The mime doll my brother Randy brought me back from France in the mid-1980s. My friend Christopher found the little yellow tin folk art piece with the bottle top and sent it to me. There’s a thin lever on the right-side you can turn to make the tongue come in and out of the mouth. The paper bookmark was given to me by my friend Priscilla. She has her own paper and silkscreen studio and she makes cool stuff. The little Africa-shaped box was given to me by my prior boss at ICANN. Marc used to travel to all the international ICANN meetings and I always had to stay back in the L.A. office. He would bring me back something interesting from each country. If you look closely at the picture, you’ll see the country of Kenya is sticking up. The meeting was in Kenya and you have to pop out that country to unlock the box because “Kenya is the key to Africa.”
The cat purse in the doll’s lap is also a favorite gift from a co-worker at CNM where I worked at the time. Audrey was the head of the print marketing group and I was constantly pestering her for CNM swag (buttons, pens) and she was constantly telling me the swag was for donors and was I a donor? No. I absolutely lost my mind when I saw the coin purse. Sal the cat was our college mascot and he was drawn with a really lecherous grin. “Hi, ladies!” No, she said, I absolutely could not have one of the coin purses. There weren’t that many made and they were for the donors! I made a devastated face, I’m sure. A few days later one of the cat purses was sitting on my desk with no other mention.
I never found a chance to thank Audrey because within a week the department had what Monsieur Bang Bang calls “The Monday Morning Massacre” where half of the whole marketing department was unceremoniously (and traumatically) laid off. Since then Sal the coin purse had sat in a pride-of-place section of my bookshelf. “Hi ladies!”
Step Two: write a poem pulling your gift items together in some way,
Gold
These are travels you didn’t take.
These are travels that came to you,
the world treasured into your hands.The best ones are choices
you would never make,
the world that exists beyond you.Cats and mimes and countries,
raspberries, loose change,
losing your place.Gift of the possible.
Gift of sacrifice.
Gift of everything under the sun.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and tell somebody thank you for a gift, either physical or intangible.
The 
Map of Time
(April 11, 2022)
Step One: Draw your own abridged biographical timeline map with a sprinkling of historical, music or random events.
Maps can be more than territories and landscapes. There are data maps and time maps too. Rethink what a map is. How do you describe your own personal time on paper? Start where you were and travel to where you are.
I decided to put my map of time in five-year increments starting from when I was born up to this year using popular girl singers of those years coupled with controversial, disastrous or just annoying events. One interesting thing I discovered what how popular music changed over pretty predictably every five years, until it didn’t. Which is a bit weird.
Step Two: Write a poem as a timeline story.
Take Another Piece of My Heart Now That We Don’t Talk
1969: Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Woodstock, the moon landing, the Manson murders, my mother’s feet swell.
1974: Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand, Watergate, Mary discovers Sonny & Cher.
1979: Blondie, Melissa Manchester, the U.S. hostage crisis, Three Mile Island.
1984: Madonna, Sheena Easton, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Band Aid, parachute pants.
1989: Gloria Estefan, Janet Jackson, the San Francisco earthquake, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first good poems.
1994: Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Woodstock again, the attack on Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
1999: Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Columbine, Y2K, Cher Scholar.
2004: Sheryl Crow, Alicia Keys, Lemony Snicket, Martha Stewart goes to prison, Janet Jackson has a wardrobe malfunction, The Edgar Winter Dog is won as a prize on Animal Planet.
2009: Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Michael Jackson dies, Obama is elected, a passenger plane lands on the Hudson River, Mary gets married in a library.
2014: Katy Perry, Rihanna, the Ferguson riot, “I can’t breathe,” Albuquerque again.
2019: Billie Eilish, Arianna Grande and Taylor Swift, the Notre-Dame fire, Covid-19 starts.
2024: Billie Eilish, Arianna Grande and Taylor Swift again, Mary’s meltdown.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down what you feel was the defining moment on your timeline in three categories: social history, music history and your own personal history.
Step One and Two: grab a real postcard (or a virtual one) and write a short message to one of your mentors. It can be a thank you message or a question or a problem posed to them.
As a reminder: this will be the poem so you can create line breaks or you can make it look like a short postcard paragraph. The point is to be brief, almost like a telegram. And to realize postcards go through the public mail service wide-open so you want to make it cryptic while still maintaining a personal message.
This is one of the better postcards I grabbed from my explorations in New York, a poetry-only library and event space called Poet’s House. This was what it looked like when it was located on Spring Street when I lived there. I see they have since moved to River Terrace. This seemed the most appropriate postcard for my poetry mentor, poet and teacher Howard Schwartz. I took many poetry workshops from this poet at the University of Missouri- St. Louis and he is still, by far, the best teacher I’ve had in poetry, the most precision-attuned word-mechanic I’ve ever come across. I’ve had other professors who have self-proclaimed to be as good but…alas, they were not. I am a far better poet for having learned how to edit a poem from him.
And our beginning was very confrontational interestingly enough. I felt overwhelmingly out of my league in that first class. Normally, I would drop a class immediately when I felt this way (I wanted a good grade average, after all) but I could immediately tell this was a class that would change my life. This was a class worth sacrificing a grade average for so I stayed. On day two or three he called on me and I had no idea what to say. He kept peppering me with questions until I finally exploded in front of the class. Mortifying! He backed off. After the class I stayed after to apologize and said I was feeling overwhelmed but wanted to stay. He was very kind about it. I stuck around like a bad kid. The first time I came up for workshop, man, what a day. I was the dumb kid in my family. I had never excelled at anything. That day, I remember everything about it, including the silly Fashion Gal baby-blue mini-skirt and matching midriff shirt I was wearing. Hardly poet’s attire.
Where would we be without generous, brilliant coaches, guides and teachers to aid us along intellectually, spiritually, professionally and physically? I had a ceramics teacher in L.A. in a studio off Venice Boulevard who not only helped me spin the wheel but spin my spirit at the same time. These people are gifts in our lives and we should write to them, sometimes.
Dear Howard,
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down a few things you know now that you wouldn’t have known now without having known your mentor.
Step One: Today’s exercise is to think about a recipe you don’t like, for any reason you don’t like it. This could be a food from childhood, like liver, or a food you’ve come to dislike as a older person because your taste buds have changed. Or some foods you just find offensive for cultural, personal or purely tactile reasons.
Dinner was a pivotal occasion in my house growing up. There was tremendous pressure to be a good dinner participant which meant weighing in on the conversation, keeping your elbows off the table and trying everything on your plate. Like not just once in your life, but every time that food made a recurrence on the table weeks or months later. I’ve recently read about the science of taste buds and learned there are some very physical reasons why some people are pickier eaters than others but this was not an idea my parents entertained back in the 1960s and 70s. As a result I have a very short list of things I will not eat (aside from cows, pig and chicken parts for various health and spiritual reasons). I will not eat stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers or anything with “hash” in the title.
Step Two: write a poem about this food you do not like, this food you will not eat in a house or with a mouse, here or there or anywhere, in a box or with a fox, in a car, tree or a train, in the dark or in the rain, with a goat or on a boat.
Then how about with me?
Foie Gras
When my mother was in the hospital a few weeks ago for not being able to breathe, they asked if she would take a tracheal intubation if this were necessary to save her life.
We all thought about this, my father and my brothers, about how a plastic tube would go through my mother’s mouth and down through her trachea so oxygen could be pumped into her lungs,
how the act of breathing would effectively cease, the autonomic nervous system would be relieved of its respiratorial duties and the force would take over.
This horrific option sat with us in the Intensive Care like a torture and we waited to see what my mother would say about it as she laid in that uncomfortable bed surrounded by the less invading plethora of masks and tubes and canulas.
Would she go through this to save her life? No. She said no.
And I thought about the geese.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write something kind about the food you do not like.
Chil
dhood Books
(April 14, 2022)
Step One: This is a big one. Find a book you loved as a child, age 7 or under. You may not have the book anymore. You can check your local library, online used bookstores or just locate pictures of the book online somewhere. Reread the book (if you can) and think about what you loved about it. Was it the pictures? The story? The characters? The outcome?
My mother never threw any of our books out. She saved them “for the grandkids.” And so after the grandkids grew up and my parents were getting ready to move from Pennsylvania to Ohio, I had a chance to save my favorite books before they went to Goodwill. There were so many that I loved. While I was planning this prompt, I remembered a book I hadn’t thought about in decades, The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway. It’s a story about a whole town coming together to build a giant jam sandwich to handle a plague of wasps. Baseline I loved the drawings, typically the case with all my top-five favorite books, not just the style but the unique things depicted in the pictures. I also loved the creativity of this book, just how was town going to bake that giant loaf of bread, I mean logistically.
My top five children’s books (excluding all the Dr. Seuss anthologies I had):
Alexander and The Magic Mouse by Martha Sanders and Philppe Fix: #1 since forever because I loved the pictures. There was this drawing of a Victorian House on a hill in the rain that I would stare at trying to figure out what all the rooms were for. Plus I loved the story and the characters. It’s about a group of friends including an alligator, a yak and a cat.- Twice Upon a Time by Irwin Shapiro and Adrienne Adams: this is about a man named Rambling Richard who wrote stories, poems and songs. He runs into a king who wants two of everything. It’s also a story about pointless busy work. I’m beginning to think this book was more important to me that I previously realized.
The Book of Giant Stories by David L. Harrison: I was drawn to stories about big giants and little mice. This book had amazing drawings, including one of a bedroom that I always thought was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was about a fearless boy who wasn’t afraid of giants. He helps one of them deal with temper tantrums and the other with obtaining some glasses. Good stuff.- The McBroom books by Sid Fleischman and Kurt Werth: I had three of these and they were about a dust-bowl family dealing with big windstorms and blowhards. I didn’t love the pictures as much as the storytelling. Fleischman was really good at narration and foreshadowing. He would always say something like, “we’ll get to the watermelons later.” And you were like “what about the watermelons!”
- Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton: I loved digging in the dirt as a hobby and therefore any books where dirt digging was depicted, big holes, big dirt piles. You had me at steam shovel.
Looking through my box today I seem many runners up: The Daddy Book by Robert Stewart and Don Madden, (exploring various dad types both professionally and ethnically and I thought the Dad on the cover was particularly handsome), Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel, (see the note about giants and mice above), Seven at One Blow by Freya Littledale and Jack Kent, (also about giants), and a book my cousin Gretchen once gave me called George and Martha by James Marshall about the life of a married couple of hippos.
I definitely think all these books were formative and made me into the person I am today. Many of these are underdog stories, problem-solving stories, pride of work stories, stories about kindness in the face of tyranny. Many of them depict diversity, not just in personalities but animals. People are worth digging into.
Step Two: write a poem about your chosen book, either retelling it, riffing on it or exploring how you can see its impact on your values or beliefs today.
Dough Unto Others
The book cover depicts a single wasp in the foreground,
a troublemaker surveying the scene,
a town of hills rising like bread,
a town he plans to conquer like Robert Preston.
.
A swarm of wasps send farmers and lords running
from village end to end.There’s a town hall meeting. The wasps come too.
“Vespa vulgaris” is written on a blackboard.
On the table we see water glasses and copious note taking.There are obstacles we must overcome.
Some are as simple as wasps.This town is made up of individually drawn
and detailed people with unique faces and outfits
and props. Some of them are colored in
or parts of them are colored in.The women come together in a tiled warehouse
directed by the town cook welding a trumpet
to cultivate and knead a pile of dough
as big as a basketball court. Look closely
and see someone trapped in the dough
waving arms for help. (Baking on this scale
is dangerous!) Beyond the door other women
are sewing a huge red-and-white tablecloth
like an AIDS quilt.The men load the dough onto a big cart
designed by a team of MacGyvers
and pulled by two tractors, two cars a truck and a bus.
They take the loaf-shaped dough to an abandoned brick building
where it bakes surrounded by about twenty kitchen ovens.They’ve built a high platform and a gigantic saw
to make two slices from the perfectly baked loaf.
Horses carry the slices out to the country
where a truck load of jam and butter
is spread over one slice by people with knives
and a tractor spreader. Helicopters
(and a tractor with balloons) hover over
the bottom slice with a top slice
waiting for those wasps, (four million allegedly),
to come nibble that jam, which they do,
as predictably as wealthy men to stocks and bonds,“Kersplat!” is the sound we hear when the second slice drops.
The town throws an outdoor party with the leftover bread
which everyone shares like its Amish barn-building day
and the birds take the sandwich away
by clutching the corners of the tablecloth in their claws.
They have “a feast for a hundred weeks.” like a food pantry.The lord and the farmer and the teacher
and the judge were seen here today.
A big idea went off without a hitch.
No politicking, sabotaging, grandstanding,
no disagreements about the flavor of the jam
or the brand of butter.Although there was still that guy hovering off to the side
not helping anyone but buzzing around each one
to say a new swarm was coming from down the way
and so this was all just a colossal waste of time.But I personally don’t think this is the case
because the farmer’s daughter has met the banker’s daughter
and the lord’s son has made plans with the teacher’s Betty Lou.
And all sorts of things were invented and new plans made
between different sorts of people who shared a job today.And so long live those waspstacles!
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write about one picture from your book that you would have liked to explore if you could have jumped into that book.
Burt Ladd with pack horses at San Carlos
Step One: create a playlist of music your father liked, or your grandfather or uncle on your father’s side or a father figure to you.
I’m actually writing about a playlist I created years ago from music lyrics my grandfather wrote down in a notebook most probably when he was working at Jicarilla reservation in northern New Mexico as a forest ranger or possibly at San Carlos reservation in southern Arizona where he might have been out working on a horse for days and nights at a time away from home.
My family found the notebook years ago and gave it to me thinking the notes were his poems. None of the words were familiar to me but I did an Internet search on the first one to make sure it wasn’t a poem or song. And boom. The notebook was like a music playlist from the early 1900s. I researched all the songs and made a mix-CD for my Dad for Father’s Day. I also put the mix on the YouTubes.
My grandfather didn’t have a phonograph or radio obviously while riding around the forests of Jicarilla and San Carlos. He either wrote these songs as a memory exercise or to aid in singing them himself. My father said he was a mean whistler and would whistle songs all the time. (My Dad does this too). It’s also unlikely he had a phonograph or radio at the houses where he lived. He probably learned these songs at town dances with live musicians.
In the back end of the notebook were exercises from a Spanish textbook. He was practicing his Spanish. Jicarilla is actually a Spanish word for this branch of Apache (the H-sounding J and the silent Ls, pronounced hick-a-Ria).
Step Two: write a poem inspired by your playlist.
Burt at Jicarilla
From the fire towers you can see the fires on the reservation.
From the fire towers you can see the past of this state
and the future, from the forests to the plains,
the mesas to the range.You have music in your saddle bag
and a girl to marry.You can see horses and sheep at Hopi,
the Katsina going in and out of the mountain,
the cows out at Solano, the past cows,
the future cows, the dead boy in the river,
the dead calf on the porch.You can see me.
You put your big sun-browned hand on my little head
like a memory.
You can see yourself wading in the gamma grass
lifting little boys and girls up to the pony.Up all those steps to that platform up in the blue sky,
up near the big white clouds you can see the world’s weather,
standing up there whistling a song written centuries ago
and centuries ahead of where we are now.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down a song you like (in a style you like) that reminds you of this person.
Burt with Andrew and Laddy
Nightstand Scavenger
(April 16, 2022)
Step One: take a photo of the items on your nightstand. Stage it, though. Take away the private stuff. Nobody wants to see your vibrator collection or your fleet of medications. Unless this particular scavenger prompt is for you and yours. Then go for it.
I cleaned a LOT off my nightstand, to be honest. In this case, what you remove probably tells a bigger story. This is a scavenger prompt of removal.
What’s left on mine is a lamp I was given (with two nightstands and a dresser) by my parents who were getting rid of a spare guest room set they had in Pennsylvania. I lived for a time in that spare room between my lives in Yonkers and Los Angeles. I would turn out the lamp and then later wake up in the night and the lamp would be back on!! Between Yonkers and Pennsylvania I had quite a few odd lamp experiences. They stopped when I moved to L.A. I chalk it up to a piece of haunted used furniture I must have had.
The blue pot is the first ceramic thing I ever made at the ceramics studio in Santa Monica College. It’s as heavy as a brick and wobbles. It holds another round wooden box which once had little paper messages folded inside. Carved on the top of the box is a Kokopelli with a piece of turquoise at his core. Kokopelli is a prehistoric Native American figure, probably overused in pop culture today as the emblem of Indianness. He represents different things to different people: music, reproduction, agriculture. I do not remember where I picked up this box. Probably at a cheesy trading post. Like the pot, I’m drawn to empty spaces.
There are always books by the bed and that beverage coaster, a recycled record album label (Neil Diamond, Hot August Night and I think the one on the other nightstand is Pablo Cruise) and two rocks. My friend Natalie sent me down the rabbit hole of crystal/rocks a few years ago. It’s interesting how you gravitate to some rocks more than others. I’m bad at both people names and crystal names but the bigger one I believe is raw septarian. The other is a polished milky quartz.
Step Two: write a poem about your nightstand assemblage.
The Altar of Night
Light and clay and rock.
What penetrates.
What does not.Retina, dust and fingerprints.
What leaves.
What stays.Warm and cold and phantoms.
What haunts.
What nurtures.Energy and the breath, fast and slow.
A light comes on.
A light goes out.Paper, soft and tickling.
What elucidates in nakedness.
What obscures under cover.Featherhead floating through dreams.
Who comes.
Who does not.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write a message for the Kokopelli box.
Th
e Map of Childhood Places
(April 17, 2022)
Step One: So the last two maps we did were maps of houses (or proverbial houses) and time. This map will be about an outdoor space of your childhood. It could be the neighborhood where you lived and played or some place you visited as a child. You don’t have to remember all the details but you can use Google Maps or physical maps to create your own simplified map. Only yours will mark episodes of your childhood, where you went, things you found.
I was torn between using a map of my Juan Tabo neighborhood in Albuquerque (which is a tangled mess of streets that always disorients me when I go back to visit) or the neighborhood where my grandparents lived, the later I chose because it’s such a simple, beautiful Western-y grid of streets. And because when I visit this place now, it appears to be slowly disappearing. The town square, (which in the town of Roy is a triangle), is full of empty buildings slowly collapsing. It’s a living metaphor for change and how change emotionally affects people depending upon their perspective. It is sad the buildings of my childhood are in ruins, like the drug store where my grandmother took me to get Johnson & Johnson shampoo and a milkshake. But nothing stays the same and that is both challenging to our hearts and a good thing. Because the new is always arriving.
My Albuquerque neighborhood is another example of this. It has turned over between diverse communities twice since I left in 1977. This is fascinating to me.
We own nothing in this world. Change owns everything.
That’s what this map is for. Use it to locate your childhood place.
And then bequeath that place to the endowment of time.
Step Two: write a poem about the child in you visiting this changed place. Or if you haven’t visited the childhood space in a long time, your idea about how the place would be today.
The Land That Time Forgot
The streets were unpaved then
and tactile. They made a sound.
I wasn’t allowed to go past the corner
block at 5th and Roosevelt.I would look up at the house,
with its second-floor door-to-nowhere.
That house would trick you
if you went inside, as if the place
had made a magical quarter turn.
The door-to-nowhere, in reality,
was facing the flat, empty East
when you thought it faced the sunlit South
and the lively town of relatives.The door-to-nowhere was an architectural cliff,
having lost its memory, having lost its balcony.
We all feared sleepwalking right out of it
and falling down into the dark, scary future.It’s been fifty years now
and the house has lost its old roof.
The wrap-around porch is sloping
and the whole town needs a coat of paint.My grandfather’s garage is out there still
but the old grease smell is gone.
They’ve stopped playing movies years ago
at the theater on Richelieu Street.
I saw The Land That Time Forgot there once
a year or so past when it was released.
We sat up in a balcony that seems inconceivable
now from the outside.We watched a movie about an island
where times never changed
and nothing ever evolved
and yet how complicated it all still was.Our fond simplicity was in being young,
hiding inside bushes, running around corners
without any duty or consequence.
Happiness without comprehension
of the wars and soap operas happening
in all the houses down all the streets.The school across from the house
has burned down and been rebuilt
a hundred times for decades of graduates.
Some were arsonists, some were idealists.They’ve paved all the streets
so you can drive through faster
and quieter to get to some other place
that time remembers.They once came out here like trailblazers
to prove it up, to build houses and wells.
My great-grandfather’s railroad station
is gone. The Polly’s train tracks are pulled out
leaving a berm more stubborn than a
pioneer swale.Restaurants shutter and tumbleweeds
literally blow through town and tangle
on the fence knots.
The people I loved have all moved
to the town outside of town
where the meadowlarks play the music
and the antelope bring the news.They say we are the dinosaurs now
attempting to time-travel to a land
that maybe time has forgot.I imagine a real place like that,
a town stuck in amber,
overlooked by pioneers
and even antiquarians
liking to restore it to a pretend past.Even an expedition of restoration
would be better than the lonely,
eternally unimproved man.For all its faults,
for how it railroads us into the future,
how heartbreaking it would be
to be left behind
by the unforeseeable agendas of time.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and imagine yourself an entrepreneur. Make an improvement on your childhood space that is entirely new. Something that is not a restoration or a museum. (I appreciate you. Museums are the go-to for older people. I’ve fantasized about turning my grandparents house into a museum for decades!) But challenge yourself to imagine something new and young instead, something the kid in you would like. Like an ice cream stand across from your house.
Step One and Two: As I was thinking about this prompt last night I was going to write about a mean girl or two from my past or just women in general. I have had much more fraught relationships with women than men. Men are so much easier and less complicated in general. Women relationships come with land mines. They can be so competitive, our complicated mother-daughter relationships spilling out into our complicated girl friendships. I even picked out this lovely St. James Tearoom postcard to symbolize the olive branch of amends over tea and a tower of yummy snacks.
But this morning as I was driving to my first ArtBrawl meeting in years, another kind of adversary asserted his presence via a song on the radio: the taste judge. And it seemed like an opportune time to spend a postcard exercise on that instead. Besides, ever since the 2018 NaPoWriMo challenge, “33 Women” (which felt like a real breakthrough), I believe the situation with my girlfriends has significantly improved.
So this is a story about somebody we’re going to call Kevin, (because I happen not to know any Kevins at the moment), and when I was in high school, “Kevin” was a drummer in a punk band. Now I had known Kevin for a long time, all the way back to grade school when he wasn’t a drummer in a punk band. He was just kind of a nerdish kid who was one of the three boys in second grade (at a school ridiculously named Fern Ridge) who didn’t join the chorus.
By the time I developed a crush on Kevin, (I was about 16 or 17), he had become a drummer in a punk band. This was unfortunate for me because I was literally Anna Pollyanna and even if I was being approached on occasion by boys in high school (and one time a girl), never were any of them drummers in punk bands.
But Kevin was now this guy who fancied himself very knowledgeable about music and he found himself one day sitting at our kitchen table in St. Louis lecturing me about my taste in music. He proclaimed in no uncertain terms that he did not like Cher or John Waite, insinuating that if we were going to date this would be a problem. I was already on the down-low about Barry Manilow, which in this situation was probably for the best. He then proceeded to glance at a cassette tape cover sitting on the table, soberly informing me that my older brother had misspelled the band Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Then he handed me two mix tapes.
Now these weren’t the kind of mixed tapes you typically get from a boy with songs assembled to describe his feelings for you. These two tapes were a test, a music test. And whether I passed the test determined if I would advance in his affections.
Now I had two older brothers (and two parents) who were all pretty unsuccessful in getting me to listen to less Cher, so I didn’t do too well with these challenges. In fact, I have always found them pretty insufferable.
So here were these cassettes (I still have them, by the way), one was a mix of Art Garfunkel songs. And this is the reason “Kevin” popped into my head today, because that cassette also contained the Simon & Garfunkel song “My Little Town” which I hadn’t heard in decades until it came up on Sirius radio this morning.
The other cassette tape had Joy Division and New Order songs on it with one Joni Mitchell song from her Blue album ending each side.
So I knew this was a test and I sat down to play these mix tapes hours later on my tape deck with mixed feelings. I mean, I didn’t hate the Art Garfunkel songs. How easy it would have been to lie for sex. (But why should you have to?) I also quite liked the New Order songs. Only today as I write this do I understand what an additional red flag those New Order songs were. A few years ago I was rewatching The Blues Brothers movie with my husband and had a sudden memory of watching the movie the only time prior with Kevin one day in his basement and, at the end, him telling me he didn’t like it. I was honestly so thrilled to be in Kevin’s basement that I couldn’t pay much attention to the plot; but how many 1980s boys hated The Blues Brothers? It seemed odd even then. He had been paying particular attention to the car chases with the Nazis. And watching it years later it all came together in a revelation: the combat boots, Joy Division, New Order, the German classes…not all of those punk bands were being ironic. I think I might have had a crush on a neo-Nazi!
But then there were the two Joni Mitchell songs. And that was the real gift. Those two songs sent me down a rabbit hole of Joni Mitchell albums for years.
At the end of the day, I did lie. I told him I only liked the Art Garfunkel songs. Fuck him. That sealed my fate, which dragged on miserably for a few more months after which I took those lessons of similes from Joni Mitchell, changed my college degree and started taking classes at the University of Missouri where I crossed paths with the poet Howard Schwartz and then one thing led to another and now I’m here.
The point is this guy was more of a disaster than the trite tones of “My Little Town.” But he gave me new music I honestly enjoyed while failing his bullshit music test.
So the challenge for today is to write a postcard to someone who was really bad for you and try to be magnanimous about some small good thing that might have come out of it. I just wrote mine below and I think it was a complete forgiveness fail; but I hope you do better with yours.
Maybe some day I’ll get there.
Dear “Kevin,”
Step Three: take your tiny little book and try again to say something nice about this person.
The 
Food of Your Motherland
(April 19, 2022)
Step One: Find a recipe from your mother’s side of your family and think about how it appeared in family traditions or day-to-day living.
My great grandfather, Christopher Stevens, was born in this house in Lelant, Cornwall. When my mother married my father she immediately embraced his southwestern culture, so not a lot of recipes from her side of the family made it into our day-to-day eating. There were some notable exceptions, my grandmother’s clam chowder recipe (with shredded carrots!) that my mother made for me every Christmas Eve because I didn’t want to eat the Oyster Stew everyone else was eating (I’m sorry, it looked like slug soup) and Cornish pasties, made with a lot of struggle and ceremony for special occasions. As her mother had learned to do, my mother for many years made her pie crust from scratch, often starting to cry when she folded it over the innyards of the pie and it broke or split. So I can literally say I have eaten a motherland dish made with the ingredient of my mother’s tears.
My mother doesn’t make them anymore and other family members have picked up the tradition; but for those last years she started using pre-made pie crusts and never cried again.
What did my cowboy father think of this dish? He was the blasphemer who poured ketchup all over his.
My brother Andrew had a birthday a few days ago. My other brother, Randy, asked him on a text thread how he was celebrating. He said “pasties for dinner.”
Step Two: write a poem about this motherland recipe.
Turnips
We once told my grandfather
a plate of turnips was mashed potatoes
because he refused to try them.
He ate the mashed and buttered turnips happily
and said they were very good.His favorite dish was a Cornish pasty.
He told us the miners
would take the wife-wrapped pies
down into the mines
just like now we take those prodigious half-moons
down into the mines of our bellies.Susan, my sister-in-law, makes the best ones now
with crusts of flour and salt and lots and lots
of butter, the little stacks of cubed steak,
squared potatoes and chopped onions
waiting to be interred, the edges
of the pie folded over and undulated.The last time I had one was in December of 2020
after a three-day trek in a red truck.
For me, Susan had taken out the meat pile
and substituted turnips. 🩷
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write a note about something you would or have added or subtracted from this family recipe.
Step One: Find a book (or related books) with plot(s) that stuck with you over the years for some reason: the adventure, the tragedy, the structure of a love story. A kind of recurring plot you love or hate.
(I am in Winslow, Arizona, this weekend, staying at the lovely La Posada for a Sarah Lawrence College reunion with the writing/reading gals. So I will be a bit more brief over the next few days so as not to miss out on any fun.)
Step Two: write a poem about that plot.
No Wuthering Heights
When I was a teenager I read all the classics, alright.
I read up on the options like a stockbroker.
I said No Wuthering Heights for me.
No Wuthering Heights.No Bridges of Madison County.
No Gone with the Wind
which didn’t end well for anybody.
No Age of Innocence.
No Jane Eyre worrying about that attic.
No Anna Karenina on the train tracks.
No Dracula time travel.
No Great Gatsby dying in the pool.I forgot to list Love in the Time of Cholera
because, unfortunately, I hadn’t read it
and also thought it was literally about cholera.I was also ambivalent on Pride and Prejudice.
And so, well, here we are.But I was emphatic: no Wuthering Heights.
No suffering hero, no tendencies
rotting into destinies. No bitter ironies,
everything beyond what it seems.
No killing to get a ghost.
No Catherine haunting the moors.
No spiral of revenge.
No villainous Heathcliff eating himself alive.
No getting what you want right when it’s too late,
No trouble in your soul.
No tragedy sinking too slowly down your throat.No. Wuthering. Heights.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and take your tiny little book and write about alternatives to your plot.
Step One: think about your mother’s record, tape or CD collection (my mother had a nice collection of 48s to start out) or what your mother liked to listen to on the radio. Or some relative on your mother’s side. Or your mother-figure. What music did they love? Create a playlist of those songs.
Growing up mother loved the handsome black crooners of the 1950s. She told me her favorites were Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. While she was recently in the hospital I was showing my dad the trailer to the new Beetlejuice movie because the original is one of his favorite movies and my mother laid in her hospital bed overhearing the trailer soundtrack and said, “I love that song.”
Interestingly, my playlist has two songs that would have been handy to have found for the two prior playlists I have already created for this project, a song with my name and a song about a road going through my home state.
Step Two: write a poem about your playlist.
Begin The Beguine
My mother taught the high-school boys
how to do the foxtrot and the charleston,how to rumba and samba.
She’d roll up the carpets and they’d arrivefor dance parties with the Valedictorian
and Homecoming Queen.She had the phonograph and the piano.
She knew all the steps.She taught them familiarity and nearness,
her hand on their shoulders,their hands on her hips.
She was a Port Orford insiderwho went on to marry
a Port Orford outsiderwho refused to cha-cha-cha.
So she danced with her father-in-law,a good dancer, my grandma once said,
for such a big guy.She got the sweet surround going
in the awkward atmosphere.And I see what she did there.
I guess that’s one way to do it.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down the 1950s-era dance you’d like to do with a beloved.
Scavenger Sunbeam
(April 22, 2022)
Step One: walk around where you are and try to capture three-to-five sunbeams or artful natural light displays happening across floors and walls. Take pictures.
If you follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you know I love me some sunbeamage.
Step Two: write a poem inspired by your pictures.
Sunchild
I was born in the land of sun
but for days I have stayed indoors.
So the sun has decided to come to me.I was raised in the decade of swimming pools.
But I can’t always make it to the water anymore.
So the pools of light now come to me.I will die someday in shadow
and the warm sun will find cracks in all the coffins
around me, its warm fingers on our mislaid, cold eyes.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down three things you like to do in the sun and three things you like to do in the rain.
Map of Pirate Treasure
(April 23, 2022)
Step One: Draw a map of where the pirate treasure is, where the old shipwreck can be found, the cave and the woods, the swamp and the stockade. Note where the high ground is. Where the herds of goats and horses can be found. Put in a red herring.
Think about childhood maps made and journeys set out to find that trove of X. What did the landscape look like? What obstacles were overcome?
Krissy and I used to play shipwreck all the time. The ocean would throw us off the ship and onto the hill between the Stern’s yard and mine. We’d miraculously find an abandoned tiny house at the base of a tree using Krissy’s diminutive wooden chair and table which we would truck down the hill from her basement to my backyard. We were survivalists who would eventually discover the hidden map and set out on day journeys through the backyards to find it.
Step Two: write a poem about lost and found treasure, or found and lost treasure.
Treasure Is as Treasure Does
The tinkling piano keys, the deep, solid sound of a pueblo song,
the smile that spreads around a room,
cheese and wine that took a genius to cultivate,
good intentions, a heart-felt apology.The bass line that hits a vein, dusk and a carousel,
cream soup and buttered bread, a smart shoulder line,
bare feet in rain gutters, sparkling light on a lake,
the quiet calm of your voice in the dark.All kinds of fills, all kinds of blooms,
all the starting-over attempts, all the kindnesses,
arriving at the devastation, your own devastation
and discovering at the spot that love is the answer.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and list out a time when you already had found the treasure and you didn’t realize it.
Dear Childhood (Imaginary) Friend,
(April 24, 2022)
Step One and Step Two: Most of us had an attachment to something as kids, an imaginary friend or a stuffed object or a blanket. Think about your childhood attachments and what convinced you to give it up, parental or peer pressure, your own conviction, or there was a sudden disappearance.
As before, we will write a postcard to this friend or object and that will be today’s poem. If you didn’t have an imaginary friend or object, you can write to a real childhood best friend. But keep this in mind: you’re writing to them as they were as children, not as they might be as adults today. You are sending a message into the past.
Sadly, I lived in a neighborhood full of older kids so until grade school started I only had friends through the friends of my mother and grandparents, like Karen from our mirror family. My neighborhood was even empty of imaginary kids!
I did have attachments to my things, like my stuffed animal people. But I never anthropomorphized them…much. I did have an unusually strong attachment to a decrepitly pink blanket though, which was very concerning to my parents. When I started school in St. Louis, in fact, there was an intervention I remember quite clearly. And sleeping without the pink, balding square of see-through trash seemed very overwhelming.
So I transferred my pink blanket obsession thereafter to a yellow afghan my grandmother Ladd had knitted for me. She made one for everybody, all my cousins and kids of my friends. Her afghans were beautiful and unusual. Our Norwegian Elkhound Tana one day chewed a hole through the yellow afgan and my grandmother made me a bigger pink one to match my obnoxiously pink bedroom.
I was pretty convinced my grandmother’s afghan had superpowers and when Scooby Doo got too scary or the monsters in my wall, (I had no closet to imagine them in), were getting too close, that blanket was a force field of armor.
The first friend I ever had lived in Roy and his name was Jarrid. He died when we were both very young. His mother recently sent my mother all her children’s afgans and my mother gave Jared’s afghan to me.
A treasure beyond treasures.
Dear Yellow Afghan with the Hole Tana Chewed Through It
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write down one mystery from your childhood that you would like solved, something as simple as a lost object or as complicated as a real neighborhood whodunit.
Step One: Find a recipe from your father’s side of your family and think about how it appeared in family traditions or day-to-day living.
We are entering our last round of prompts and this is our last recipe challenge.
This is one of my favorite stories to tell about my father. And I want to start by saying, families are complicated organisms, with issues sometimes going back generations. Many of our stories foreshadow these things in touching ways.
My mother loves to cook. I never, until very recently, learned to cook. I was known in my family for being a terrible cook. My husband’s eye once started twitching when I was asking him about random substitutions in a case of emergency. But recently I’ve been doing dinner kits for various reasons and I’ve been learning to do these things. One of the required necessities in some of these recipes is knowing how to fry an egg. Food kits assume you know how to do these basic things.
Now my father makes a perfect, glorious fried egg. And I’ve gone back to him more than once asking him to teach me how he does it. He often tells this story about the cowboys and fried eggs.
He says he father made him a fried egg every morning growing up, until one day he asked his father to make the egg without the edges being crispy brown. He came to breakfast the next morning and his father wasn’t there and his father never made him breakfast ever again. Harsh! My father tells this story as a lesson in not being over-critical when someone is doing something nice for you. But my father himself once told my mother her banana cream pie was “soupy” and guess what? None of us got banana cream pie ever again after that. WTF.
Anyway, my father will continue to say that on a cattle drive camp the eggs would always have brown crispy edges because the camp cook would need to cook a large amount of fried eggs in a short time and would cook them quickly on the chuck wagon kitchen equivalent of high.
“Don’t cook them like the cowboys!” my father would exclaim. “Don’t cook your eggs on high.”
(Silly me, I used to think everything was cooked on high, just like Nigel Tufnel wanted everything to go to eleven. High+1. Why not?)
But okay. Good tip. Cook eggs on medium. He also recommended cracking the egg into a cool pan and then starting up the heat.
I haven’t perfected my egg yet. But I keep practicing them every Sunday. Yum!
Step Two: write a poem about this recipe.
Cowboy Eggs
My father was telling me how to cook eggs
and I lost track of what he was saying
because I was now thinking about the cowboys
standing around that food truck on the plains,
some bean-framed plate called grub
in their hands, dirt and sweat dripping down
from unwashed hair, the grease burns,
bubbling whites, warm yolk on chaps,
how the hell you would even travel with eggs.And now I’m imagining some cowpoke
walking into town for a dozen
and I’m the one at the mercantile
selling them to him.And by now the edges have gone and burnt
all around my heart.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write about a food that causes an emotional reaction for you, like Proust’s madeleine.
Step One: This is our last prompt for books and our task is to locate that writer who somehow defines you in some way, preferably somebody you at least knew about as a child, even if this writer wasn’t one of “your writers” at that time, someone you have grown up with and maybe your opinions have changed about them over the years, for good or bad.
For me, this is Mark Twain. I grew up in St. Louis which is part of the greater Twainlandia of eastern Missouri. You have your Mark Twain chain of banks, your Mark Twain neighborhood, forget about the fictional references everywhere. In St. Louis you’re also not that far from the touristy town of Hannibal, Missouri, which has been retrofit downtown to look like his most famous novels. And then there’s the big river itself, the muddy Mississippi ever under-looming the city of St. Louis, the river Mark Twain loved and dreamed of piloting as a riverboat captain until the Civil War dashed his dream and sent him west to become a journalist. My childhood memories of the St. Louis riverfront always include those bright riverboats with their iconic river wheels.
And I must tell you, as a kid this was all pretty annoying and cheesy. The Mark Twain brand was too much. A bank? Really? He had become a local cartoon with that overgrown mustache and bushy eyebrows. No one took him seriously outside of high school lit classes.
Two things happened to change my mind about Mark Twain. First we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a high-school lit class. Through a bit of social drama during the book’s group-paper project, I ended up writing a paper by myself and having it read aloud by the teacher to the class, which was both mortifying and thrilling.
But I still wasn’t taking the vocation of writing very seriously. Around that same time, my grandparents from Oregon wanted to see Hannibal so we all went. And it was pretty cheesy and pandering at that time. But one of the buildings had a room full of Twain-stuff and sitting there was his manual typewriter. It looked tough and unwieldy and for the first time it occurred to me the act of writing could be classified as a labor, if one were slumped over that thing, pounding the keys for long durations of time.
So then I left St. Louis in the 1990s and found myself in the New York City area. In what might have amounted to nostalgia, I visited the home of Mark Twain nearby in Hartford, Connecticut, which I would recommend to anybody as the best writer’s house in the universe, Mark Twain’s creativity evident in every inch of that stunning house. Here was a Mark Twain museum that took him seriously.
And from there I started paying more attention to Mark Twain and the things he said. He because a role model for me not because of his sentences, paragraphs and chapters, but for the way he constructed aphorisms and his comedy set-ups, such as the great anti-racist move at the end of Huck Finn, where Twain essentially defends defending African Americans. Huck knows society wants him to turn his friend, the slave Jim, back in to slavery. In his gut, he knows this isn’t right. But society has confused him and so he actually prays to become a proper member of society.
Huck is actually trembling when he says, “Alright, then, I’ll go to hell.” This is the famous, both sobering and humorous turn of Huckleberry Finn, a redrawing of the lines for morality and human value. It’s a pretty immense moment in American literature. But I feel we have forgotten the awesome gravity of the powerfully ironic sentences that follow: “It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they were said. And I let them stay said.”
Super sky point to Mark Twain.
Courage in writing.
This is why he is my writer.
We have to stop here and say Mark Twain should have been kinder in speaking about Indian Nation. True, he traveled from Missouri to Nevada smack during the very violent Indian Wars and that was probably super-scary, but still. We’re all of a piece.
By the way, Mark Twain’s ideas are still controversial. I had the opportunity to see Hal Holbrook do his Mark Twain show before Holbrook passed away. The show was basically using Mark Twain’s writings to recreate a lecture (or comedy act) Twain gave back in the day, a kind of show Twain helped to pioneer. People have the nostalgic idea Twain was a nostalgic writer, but he was a fully progressive thinker. He was so progressive, he asked that his unabridged autobiography not be published until one-hundred years after his death. At the Holbrook show, the couple next to us didn’t laugh once. In fact, they got up and walked out before the show was over.
Step Two: write a poem about your writer.
The Free Man
“If you tell the truth,
you don’t have to remember anything.”
– Mark TwainOn Twitter yesterday a woman said we were better off
in the company of wild bears because “men lie”and she wasn’t talking about universal man.
And I thought a better way to say that would be that men in our society are heavily conditioned to obscure the truth.
Which is why it’s so refreshing to come across that truth-telling man,
his easy conscience showing on his shoulders and in his eyes,
showing in the way he stands in the world.He’s not sermonizing on a corner.
He’s not organizing a posse.
He’s flipping out truths like poker cards.And yet, he’s worried about how his ideas will land.
So he takes a play from the book of Emily Dickinson and he tells it slant.He has his Achilles heel; he has his blind spots
and he has plenty of friends who will tell him
because truth attracts truth just like a life of lies begets a life of lies.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write something you’ve dog-eared or highlighted from your writer.
Playlist on a Theme
(April 27, 2022)
Step One: This is our last prompt for music and the goal today is to create any kind of playlist you want to based on a theme, any theme that interests you like songs referencing the moon or sun, songs that reference sex outdoors, songs about balloons or knives or food. Songs about God. Classical songs composed for kings and queens. Whatever.
I have decided to create a playlist of popular instrumental songs or wordless songs by popular bands, songs without lyrics. And yes, “The Hustle” made it into the playlist even though there are a few words in there. But it is one of my favorite instrumental songs. I also came upon the rejiggered and extended “Rockford Files Theme” while compiling this playlist and I love everything about that funny video. It’s only missing one thing, Rockford’s iconic backup-360.
Also, you should consider what kind of poem might come out of your playlist. The idea of putting words to wordlessness was kind of appealing to me.
Step Two: write that poem.
The Big Problem With Going That Way Is the Cold, Hard Fact That It Makes Everybody Else Go That Way Too
Easy to ambiguate
simple word hangs
spider moving to babelize
leaving an exo-hell behind
without any muscle
footprints enigmatize easily
soul scratching protowords
evidence of unbeing
pollen similes, orchestral
chamisa float, drifting mountain
is not hard, hardening
is not tough, tough is not hard,
mean does not mean—
grammar without stones
Step Three: take your tiny little book and write some babel.
Closet Things
(April 28, 2022)
Step One: This is our last prompt for scavenging. Today the goal is to pick a closet and find about five random things from that closet and take a photo of those things.
The key I guess is to wisely pick your closet. What are things you want to keep “in the closet” as it were? You can explore risk or exploration or just randomness. I have one closet that’s basically coats and un-played board games. Then I have a closet full of broken things I might use one day, draft notes and office supplies.
These items I pulled from my bedroom closet where I’ve recently consolidated my hats. Why don’t I wear hats more often since I love hats? The pink duck I bought decades ago from Bath and Body Works at the mall. It was purchased with a magic-8-ball duck that works. This one was supposed to glow in the tub but it never worked and I don’t have the heart to throw it out. Mothballs because those are in every closet in case New Mexico moths start hatching and it’s a horror movie here when they do that. The water bottle I decaled as part of my latch-hook outfit a few years ago. We were tasked with making our own clothes for a dinner and since I’m arts-and-crafts challenged, I found things an 8-year old could do including homemade jewelry, water bottles and a latch-hook ensemble. The water bottle is so blingy I actually don’t want to use it for its purpose. The mosaic heart is from a shop at the Abiquiu Inn in Abiquiu, New Mexico. I got really sick the weekend I purchased it. The Abiquiu Inn bookmarked the Covid years for me. So the heart kind of symbolizes going through that experience.
Step Two: write a poem that ties together those things.
What Things Do
What things do
to glow when you’re looking my way.What things do
to shade the heart on our faces.What things do
to map the mosaic of affection.What things do
to sparkle over our bodies of water.What things do to us
to keep the diminishing moths at bay.The crafty, cunning, profound things we do.
All the things we do.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and name a thing that connects you to a beloved person.
May of Your Childhood Fantasy Landscape
(April 29, 2022)
Step One: Speaking of sad losses (see the next post), this is my second attempt at writing this prompt. This morning, (April 30), I accidentally copied over yesterday’s post, (for April 29), with no backup to be found. It’s a good example of how precarious NaPoWriMo is because every poem starts that morning without much pre-writing. So I literally have to re-invent this thing from scratch. Sigh.
This is the last map prompt and the challenge is to think about some place you wanted to live as a kid, either a real place with some kind of childhood fictional belief associated with it or a completely imaginary place like Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings or some combination of the two like San Nicolas Island for me, which I never realized until I started working on this prompt was a real island just past Catalina in southern California.
When I was a kid I loved the book Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. It was a story about a Native American heroine who got stranded on an island when her family left her behind. For the next 18 years she learned how to survive and befriended the animals. However, in my fantasy version she runs into another stranded boy and here is where I was confusing the book with the movie The Blue Lagoon (1980) with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins which came out right around the time I read Island of the Blue Dolphins. I had never seen The Blue Lagoon but I thought I had a pretty good idea what was going on there. Lots of kissing!
So my fantasy childhood place is a mash up of those two island stories.
Step Two: write a poem about your fantastical childhood place.
When You Don’t Know What Anything Means, But You Long to Know What Everything Means
You’ve already erected the treehouse
which is good because this is something
then I won’t have to do.You’ve been years here already,
island boy, carving tools and making friends.
You know a flower from a flower.
You know how to fish and dive deep
into the pond of Peninsula Cove.
(That’s the name of the island, I swear.)I was just following my nose
from the thicket to the fire
because I never learned how to cook
or make baskets from the bush.I am not that strong in our out of a canoe.
You probably thought I was going to be a lifesaver
when I showed up at twilight with my big torch
instead of someone to help spend all this time.But you’ve anticipated the eye rolling and the arguments
about rescue flags and turning the island fox into a pet.
You’ve often wondered if you weren’t better off
before.But I can tell a few jokes from my tribe
that come in handy for comic relief
and I’m learning how to write poems with innuendos.
Except you haven’t found the time to invent paper yet.
Step Three: take your tiny little book and note your favorite place in your fantasy location.
Step One and Step Two: Well, this is the last challenge of the last challenge. I can’t believe it’s here. I can’t believe the month went off without a hitch considering. Today’s last postcard challenge is about loss and grief. It’s a bit bizarre that I came up with these categories months ago, long before the year collapsed into loss and grief, not just for myself but for some of my friends. This is a tough time. So it’s appropriate to take a moment to speak to grief directly. Think about something or someone you have lost, or just the ongoingness of loss itself. Send your thoughts in a postcard, which will the your final poem.
One of the worst ideas about grief for me is about how “they live on in your memory.” What a rickety place to store all our condolences. Memory is mendacious, memory itself dies. No comfort lies there for me. I tell my friends, this is our life now, managing grief. Our people are aging. It’s not going to get better. It sometimes feels like the world is evaporating all around the edges.
It’s never been more important to lean into the immediate now, to focus on the now more than ever.
It’s also somewhat apropos that we’ll end with a postcard I picked up decades ago at the Mark Twain house in Connecticut, the invention into which Mark Twain invested everything he had, that dreadful looking thing called the Paige Compositor designed to replace human typesetting. It’s amazing his Connecticut museum was able to grab the last surviving machine (another reason to visit them). Twain lost his fortune to this thing. He eventually paid off his debts but during that hard time he also lost his wife, beloved daughter and much of his joie de vie.
He lived from one Haley’s Comet to the next, saying before his death, “I came in with Halley’s Comet. It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”
Mark Twain does not live on in my memory. But he does live on in literature.
Dear Loss
Step Three: take your tiny little book and say goodbye to this 2024 NaPoWriMo Challenge.