🌟 Get ready for an unforgettable evening! 🌟
Join us for an electrifying book reading event as the talented Gabby Gilliam unveils her latest masterpiece, No Ocean Spit Me Out!
But that’s not all! Friends and fellow literary stars Robert Fleming and Alan Bern will also be captivating us with their powerful readings. 🌟✨
Don’t miss this extraordinary event—it’s FREE and open to everyone! 🎉📚Register here for the ZOOM link.
days
hours minutes seconds
until
“NO OCEAN SPIT ME OUT” IS LIVE!
Come hear Gabby read from her new book!
Friends Robert Fleming and Alan Bern will also read!
Free and open to the public!
Register here for the ZOOM link.
days
hours minutes seconds
until
~NO OCEAN SPIT ME OUT~ IS LIVE!
I was thrilled today to have the privilege to mail three new Old Scratch Press books off to the National Book Awards! If you follow all of our doings around here you may have seen this post from last year, where I was lucky enough to do the same thing!
Gosh, you know, we’re going up against the big guys when we send our books in to the National Books Awards. Most of the other books being sent in are going to have been written by well-established poets with a long history of publication, or brand new poets being championed by their mentors who are the big guys in their fields, and those other books are also going to come from traditional (read as: large and monied) presses or university presses, which, like the big publishing houses, also have lots of disposable income and connections. I got my MFA; I know how that all works. And still, I don’t care about the competition. I care that we have wonderful poets. Morgan Golladay has been writing her poetry throughout most of her adult life, and salting it away for “someday,” and Nadja Maril and Gabby Gilliam have been submitting and getting small wins with their writing for years now, and why isn’t their writing as deserving as anyone else’s? It absolutely is! It gives me a total thrill to just think about getting them into this contest, where they get a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with the “big guys.” And get this—Carolyn Forché is one of the judges this year! Carolyn Forché! It’s mind-blowing to think that a poet from our little collective is going to be read by her. I still remember how my teachers raved about Carolyn Forché’s book THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US back in the ’90s. We read it and discussed it over and over with reverence. The idea that she’ll be reading one of our books? It’s just wild.
So, lovely people following our progress as a collective and a press, please join me in crossing your fingers and blowing on one of these:
as we send Gabby, Nadja, and Morgan off to the National Book Awards to try their luck!
Flash prose, poetry, and essays inspired by her kitchen, garden, and family memories; Nadja Maril’s chapbook, RECIPES FROM. MY GARDEN is a sensual feast for the soul. Drawing upon her life experiences as an artist’s daughter, antiques dealer, journalist, and author; Maril mines simple objects for meaning and creates a lavish buffet.
Editorial Praise for RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN
“Suffused with the tastes of cilantro, mint, and cucumber fresh from a garden, the smell of salt air from the ocean’s edge, the familiar scent of coffee and tobacco from a father’s hug, or the simple pleasure of the sounds of clicking insects through a backdoor screen, Nadja Maril’s lovely and sensitive RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN is a feast for the senses and a balm for the spirit. While exploring personal memories that touch on abstract questions of identity and history, Maril also reminds us of the tiny yet profound comforts of earthly existence.”
–Aaron Hamburger, author of HOTEL CUBA—
“In RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN, Nadja Maril casts a richly sensual literary spell. From the deft and resonant garden-inspired pieces that find the taste of ‘summer’ in basil and celebrate the ‘welcoming gaze of sunflowers,’ to the sharply observed portraits of small yet potent memories— buying a perfect dress with her mother; baking a cake ‘too beautiful to be cut’– Maril mines moral and spiritual meaning from everyday life. The promise Maril makes about a ‘chicken and rice’ recipe is true of this whole vibrant chapbook: ‘soul nutrition it will provide.’ ”
–Elizabeth Searle, novelist and scriptwriter (A FourSided Bed; I’ll Show You Mine)–
“RECIPES FROM MY GARDENcelebrates the splendor of traversing a literary life and surviving the time of Covid. Nadja Maril’s first collection of poetic prose, flash memoir, and poetry introduces us to her family, her nurtured garden, and the myriad spaces she navigates to cope with our world. With true artistic excellence, Nadja’s words yearn for an understanding of what troubles us, inviting us into a landscape of riddles, questions and puzzles.”
–Indigo Moor, author of Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something—
“[RECIPES FROM MY GARDEN] is a treasure of small love stories: odes to beloved kitchens, and vegetable gardens, and the simple joys of a blooming sunflower. It is a book of memory and of pleasure that speaks of the love of family across many generations. The passed-down recipes inside the pages are themselves the most generous kind of love letter.”
–Susan Conley, author of Landslide—
[In NO OCEAN SPIT ME OUT] Gabby Gilliam’s verse preserves the feel of the summer farm, contrasting its fertile brightness with the struggle between grief and the sudden absence of connection to family and place. Belonging and the struggle to continue remembering clash on the page, while the passion for life’s diverse and tactile experiences dazzle the reader with tantalizing gasps of zucchini, crab apples, and blackberry wine. Each poem gives the reader their own lingering taste of her ghosts. -Kim Malinowski-
NO OCEAN SPIT ME OUT is a captivating debut collection of poetry that delves deep into the intricate tapestry of family dynamics and personal evolution. Within its 30 poems, the collection embarks on a profound journey through the stages of coming of age, navigating the complexities of familial bonds, grappling with organized religion, and ultimately, embracing the essence of self-acceptance. Whether you’re seeking solace in the shared experiences of family relationships or searching for introspective insights into the nuances of identity and faith, this collection offers a profound and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition.
“Sometimes stark, but always beautiful, these free verse celebrations of North Mountain introduce a seasonal sense of environmental transitions to the observer and reader’s eye, with time’s passage changing everything and nothing…Aside from a personal visit to North Mountain, there is no better way of appreciating its beauty, impact, and presence over the eons than through THE SONG OF NORTH MOUNTAIN.” —MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW—
From the mighty pen of artist and author Morgan Golladay comes THE SONG OF NORTH MOUNTAIN, a transformative collection of poetry and art celebrating the famous and mystical North Mountain of Appalachia.
North Mountain, a wildland in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests of western Virginia, has been recognized by the Wilderness Society as a special place worthy of protection from logging and road construction. The Wilderness Society has designated the area as a “Mountain Treasure.”
Morgan Golladay brings her readers to dwell in the reverence of this wonderful wilderness. Golladay is an award-winning author who was raised on North Mountain and lives in coastal Delaware as part of a thriving artist and author community. All words and art in this book are by Golladay.
Audiobook (available now, and Audible account not needed to buy or listen!)
Good luck women! May your wonderful books triumph!
Check out the wonderful writing and art: curated by Old Scratch Press!
Lot’s of poetry for National Poetry Month plus other literary delights await you!
Just like a great lunch you can get it in an instant!
As a human perhaps the toughest task I face is what the heck to feed me, and the spouse and child, each day for dinner. Breakfast everyone is on their own. Daughter, who has a light appetite, has a protein shake. Spouse, who has a sweet tooth, has some sort of flaky thing and coffee. I have several coffeeeeeees, and, well, I never know. Could be beans on toast. Coudl be leftover takeout. Could be tomatoes and olives in a bowl. Could be yogurt. Might be soup. Seldom is eggs.
Lunch… do people eat lunch? I don’t always. The meals seem to run into each other, and usually lunch is the loser for me, because there is not time to have breakfast, do all the morning things, then do the work things, and fit in lunch too, before it’s time for dinner. But I love lunch. I love lentils and tuna, salads of any kind, rice and tofu, possibly more yogurt. Daughter eats the same meal every day, packed in a lunch bag, Annie’s Organic Star Pasta. We put it in a thermos, and, for about four years now, she eats it…. every. single. day. Dedication. Spouse eats, most likely, more sweet and flaky things. But me, I am most apt to have more coffee, and maybe chomp on some lettuce as I am adding some to the guinea pig cage.
Dinner. Dinner ie exasperating. You know it is! There are, if your life is anything like mine, too many people (and we are only three) who like too disparate things, and have crazy schedules, and it can be downright tough to get everything ready on time for everyone’s schedule, but the toughest of all is thinking WHAT?? what to feed everyone.
Enter poetry, short memoir, short short stories, and art, to save the day, as usual!
As you may know, if you have read this blog before. I started a lit mag, Instant Noodles (gee, named after food. Obsessed? Maybe…..), and now Old Scratch Press is running it. Up until this year I was the only one choosing the pieces, and, often I was moved to choose pieces about food. And I have to say, on a side note, getting to read so many wonderful entries has been nothing but a pleasure. I love Instant Noodles, and I have really enjoyed all the pieces, and all the art too. But, yes, it may be possible to make the assumption that I am slightly food… centric? Motivated? Obsessed? And I have often been charmed by pieces that relate to food in some way, even if it is only in my mind.
And so, in this post, I want to direct you to take a look at a few of them.
The first is the memory piece by John Johnson, “Moss Soup and Manicotti,” where he remembers his grandmother’s cooking, “For love in this family was measured by the number of courses served and the temperature in the kitchen….”
“If Only,” by Bethany A. Beeler, is a wonderful painting that looks, to me, like my dearest love, a steaming mug of coffee:
My second favorite edible may be butter… True!
“…the wood cylinder moans,
the paddles slow,
the moon is full,
the butter comes.”
Writes Cynthia Gallaher in her poem “Butter Eaters.”
I have long loved, “This Is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams, the famous short piece about plums. I also love “Stolen Plums,” by Benjiman B. White:
“…In a lonely field
Full of future and autumn
And a windblown harvest
Forced by growth
To thump against gravity
And hunger….”
And, finally, if you cannot wait a second longer to eat, you can meet me and Willie Schatz in “Molly’s Magic Kitchen,”
“Shit! I forgot to buy the fucking fresh tomatoes. But we have sun-dried. I’ll work around it.”
Of course she will, as she did two days prior when she forgot the dough needed 24 hours to rise and recovered by scrubbing the pizza for pasta primavera or five days earlier when she left her cherished butter lettuce at the grocery and could atone for the evil deed only with a luscious chopped salad or two weeks ago when she entered her realm crowing about the terrific tuna casserole we were going to enjoy only to realize she had bought sardines and would have to settle for a salad Niçoise (that of course was not chopped liver).
So, for dinner tonight, I fell back on a childhood meal that both my mother and my father used to make from time-to-time when magic and inspiration failed them: leftover meat in gravy ladled over extra cripsy toast. I like to eat mine with hot cherry peppers, and each bite will have, if I’m lucky, meat, bread, gravy, a smidgeon of some sort of potato (I made scalloped), a little scrap of veg., and a small bit of hot cherry pepper, to cut through all that thick buttery gravy and make the moutful pop.
It’s pouring down cold buckets of icy rain where I am.
Wherever you are, may you be full of something nice and warm.
What’s for dinner at your place?
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 