Tag: #DiannePearce

YIKES! Don’t Publish That!

Published on by dianneP1 Comment

One of the perks of running Old Scratch Press (OSP) and Instant Noodles Lit Mag (IN) is that I (we, OSP) get to belong the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. They are incredibly helpful, and have so many resources we can use, including the ability to ask the other presses questions through the LISTSERV.

This week I listened to a webinar from a bit back on what you can and cannot use from others’ work in your work… spoiler alert, nope. nope, nope, you cannot use those Taylor Swift lyrics, no matter how perfect they are for your piece. Why? Because Taylor wrote them, for her piece. Cry me a small stream (see what I did there?) but you gotta write your own!

One form the webinar really did not recommend was Cento. And from the looks of my very unscientific Google search, there are a lot of them:

Well, why not?

As in the Taylor Swift example, those poets wrote those lines in their poems, to express their thoughts, and that doesn’t mean you can co-opt them, even though it is a fun writing exercise to try to knit them together. They also recommend against publishing Golden Shovels.

The webinar, for CLMP members, was helmed by Jeffrey Levine (a lawyer and Publisher of Tupelo Press) and Fred Courtright (President of The Permissions Company). And I was shocked to find out how many instances there are where authors should be getting permission, but maybe aren’t.

Copyright is, very basically, attached to intellectual property, so something we cannot touch with our fingers, even if those ideas are pressed into an LP, or printed in a book, or applied to watercolor paper. It’s the imaginings, the wordplay, the artistic or editorial or even advertising verbiage, or the design, creation, work of another artist. And we can’t use what isn’t ours without permission from its creator, or, and maybe more likely, its rights holder. Frankly, and this is where some writers disagree with me, this makes perfect sense to me if I think about someone taking my work, and using it in their own piece, and it also makes sense to me as an artist. I want so badly to use the lyrics to songs that I imbue with this meaning and emotion that only they can have, and it’s tougher to come up with my own “pretend” song, but I really need to push my writing to the next level, and do it. You don’t have to register your work with US Copyright to be protected, but we do copyright all books we publish as a matter of course.

What does copyright leave out? It does not apply to material that is not truly original, to anything already in the public domain, or to broad concepts such as ideas, systems, processes, or methods. Those belong more to patent and trademark, which overlap only in small ways that I’m not expert enough on to explain, so investigate. Copyright also does not cover names, titles, slogans, or very short phrases. In literary settings, though, it is usually safer to treat even brief lines as if they might be protected, simply to avoid trouble. How long does copyright protection remain in place? In most cases it lasts for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. For anonymous work or work created as a work for hire, the term is different. It lasts either ninety five years from the date it was first published or one hundred twenty years from the date it was created, and it ends when the earlier of those two periods runs out.

The publisher never takes copyright. The copyright remains with the author. The publisher only licenses the copyright, meaning the publisher has the right to print (or otherwise make available) or produce the work for some (limited) period of time. But if you publish a poem, for example, with a publisher, and you sign a contract, that poem may “belong” to the publisher for the duration of the contract. We’ve never held back an author from taking a work back or using it somewhere else, but I cannot speak for all publishers, so, though it should not be a problem to include in your chapbook a poem you published somewhere else, you may have to obtain permission to reprint it in another place. Do you have time to do that?

Another really interesting point the webinar brought up was that if a work is in the public domain, you do not need permission to use it. Fair use is a grey area, and so I would never recommend deciding on your own that something is fair use. I would suggest you contact Fred.

If you want to use an old poem in its original language, a piece that is long out of copyright, you can quote it freely. But if you want to use a modern translation of that same piece, the translation is probably under copyright. If you want to use something that is still in copyright, you might need permission from the copyright holder and also the holder of the copyright of the translation, and suddenly you’re in the weeds. And a lot of this costs money, to track down the copyright, and to pay for use. The webinar recommended the Watch File at the Harry Ransom Center as a good place to start. One person on the call said she often would ask bands directly, on their social media, if she could use their music or lyrics, but the presenters pointed out that while the band may (may, important distinction) hold copyright, someone else may hold the rights, and those folks could have very good “bots” looking for it on the internet, and show up with a big bill for you.

Even internet memes, tweets, etc., could belong to the person who posted them, and there could be consequences (of the financial kind is what we’re talking here) for you if you use them. And I liked that they made it clear that attribution (taken from “Friend of the Devil” by the Grateful Dead) does not give you permission: you can still find yourself on the hook for a lot of money. Yikes! And just because the author of a poem holds the copyright this doesn’t mean they’re not in a publishing deal where the publisher might own the reprint rights. You have to check it out to be sure.

The advice out there can differ greatly, and even The Poetry Foundation may have advice about fair use that the federal courts would not agree with, so the webinar strongly recommended that you either get permission, using someone like Fred, or skip it.

What do you think? Have you been playing with licensing fire? I am always encouraging authors to start an editing and publishing fund, but you may need a violation fund too! I hope not!

So friends I hope that you can sees
"fair use" doesn't grow like leaves
and poets and other fools like me
as much as you would like it free
accept that permission has a fee
and you can't pick from another's tree.

Dianne Pearce is the chief editor and bottle washer at Current Words Publishing, and the half-cocked imaginer behind Old Scratch Press and Instant Noodles. Pearce loves helping writers realize the dream of having their work published. I mean she is really crazy about doing that for some reason. To that end, to join in the fray, to look at the thing from the other side, to stand in another’s shoes, and all of those things, she is fully expecting and promising to publish her first collection of poetry, In the Cancer Cafeteria, spring of 2026. Please don’t hold your breath. For very long. Happy Holidays!

Motorcycle Betrayal Poems

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When I was in school studying writing, I had some just lovely, encouraging professors. One of them was Christopher Buckley.

Chris was always telling me other poets I reminded him of. One of those was Charles Simic, and another was Diane Wakowski. Chris was so wonderful, in fact, that he had studied with Diane, and he helped me organize for her to come and do a reading on campus, from Michigan to West Chester, Pennsylvania. It was a little bit strange, meeting Diane, because I had imagined her to be like if Twiggy and Patti Smith were merged into a single person who wrote kick-ass poetry. In reality she was a tiny thing, and a little prickly around the edges. I was star-struck and shy. I had read (lord knows how, as we didn’t have the internet, maybe in one of her poems) that she was a huge fan of freshwater pearls, and I bought a necklace and bracelet to give to her. She didn’t open the gift in my presence, and I never heard from her to hear if she liked them. But, in my very young mind, I thought she was everything I wanted to be: full-time professor, writing poetry all the time, and just generally badass, which, I guess, included being a little prickly and unfriendly. As introverted as I am, I am also a people-pleaser, so though I don’t want to talk in situations where I don’t know everyone, I do talk, because I am worried about not being nice enough to everyone else. And then I am exhausted after. Maybe Diane had already learned the art of taking care of herself. She was born the year after my dad, so she was well into middle-age when I met her.

The book I have pictured at the start of this post is the one that made me love her: The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. I mean, she got on motorcycles. My sister (younger than me by 8 years) once had a motorcycle boyfriend, in fact he was a sweet guy, and we’re all still friends with him, and he once let me climb on behind him so that he could drive me around Sea Isle City on his motorcycle. But, to stay on behind a rider, you have to hold on to the rider’s body, and Reuel (the boyfriend) was incredibly fit and hot, like Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise hot. I felt so afraid of falling off and dying and so wrong for gripping onto his body for dear life that I cut the ride short. Diane would not have cut the ride short even if it was with her sister’s hot boyfriend. Diane has always seemed to me like a woman who knows who she is and what she wants, and gets what she wants. She might have been the Taylor Swift of the 1970s, because to date her, and to break up with her, was to have a vicious poem written about you.

Dedication in the original The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems

At that point in my life I thought I had all possibilities ahead of me, as young optimistic people do. I thought I could become a thin woman who rode on the back of motorcycles and penned vicious poems about love. Diane also seemed… horny, which, raised by a very Methodist mother who got pregnant as a teenager, I was not allowed to be, so that seemed very flash and exciting to me too.

Honestly, you may think it silly yo say, because poetry is just poems, no big deal, but being a poet was such a monumental thing to me that I’m still trying to give myself permission to do it. Permission Diane never seemed to need, but Dianne definitely needs, to this very day.

If Diane was a sort of a hero, but not the warmest or nicest hero, why bring her up to you? Why not just let her, and her work, slide into obscurity?

I think because she is an unapologetic woman; she is who she is, lusty, strong, angry, successful (even if success did mean getting stuck in Michigan!), and felt no need to be mushy with a grad student who idolized her. No grad students have idolized me, but I expect it could be annoying as well as nice.

I told my sister last week that we’ve lost two Diane’s this year, Keaton and Ladd, both single Ns, unlike my double. Wakowski is up there, and also a single N. I don’t know if I can lose another one this year, so I hope she’s not on a motorcycle these days. And, then again, I kinda hope she is.

“She digs her teeth into the slaveries of woman, she cries them aloud with such fulminating energy that the chains begin to melt of themselves. Reaching into the hive of her angers, she plucks out images of fear and delight that are transparent yet loaded with the darknesses of life. Diane Wakoski is an important and moving poet.”–The New York Times

In 1971, Diane Wakoski published The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems to tremendous acclaim. Relevant, moving–at times shocking–it is Wakoski’s honesty and bravery as an artist that continues to astonish, delight, inspire, and liberate readers.

Wakoski responds to betrayal in a variety of ways including fantasies such as drilling bullet holes into the bodies of unfaithful lovers. But even her anger can be winking, as in the book’s sly dedication to “all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.”

“The Bouquet”

“I Have Had to Learn to Live with My Face”

Have you heard of Diane Wakowski? What do you think of her? If you found any links to video of her, send it this way!

It’s Not Too Late for Gravy

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The holiday/end of year issue of INSTANT NOODLES, the issue where we always ask people to try for humor. Do you have what it takes to make us smile?

Submissions for 2025 are open through November 2, 2025.

The Old Scratch Press team asks that all fiction/non-fiction pieces adhere to a word count of 1,000 words or less. 

2025 Themes and Topics

GRAVY is our 2025 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday gravy fails, mishaps, ridiculous gravy encounters (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best wry work about gravy, in general. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly. Submissions for GRAVY are open through NOVEMBER 2, 2025; the issue will publish on DECEMBER 1, 2025. Please CLICK HERE to submit. We’re looking for short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, art, and multi-media.

INSTANT NOODLES is always free to submit to, and free to read. We’re about to announce the pieces that were published that we’re submitting to BEST OF THE NET and PUSHCART, so stay tuned to this station!

Thanks for being an INSTANT NOODLES participant and/or fan! We appreciate you giving indie authors a place to get read!

Dreams of the Return

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dreams of the return

Alan Bern is more than just the author of DREAMS OF THE RETURN—he’s also one of the founding voices of Old Scratch Press, a collective born from a group of terrific writers with a deep love of traditional and hybrid poetry, prose, and art. As a retired children’s librarian and cofounder (with Robert Woods) of the fine-press publisher Lines & Faces, Alan has long pursued the merging of word, image, and place.

In DREAMS OF THE RETURN, he turns his lens to Italy—in particular the South—bringing to life landscapes both storied and luminous through his own photographs and through classic Italian poetry, delivered both in its original form and in his own translations. The journey is lyrical, immersive: it’s not merely a travel guide, but a portrait of longing, place, memory, and beauty.

And that’s something Alan does beautifully—his artistry weaves together what he’s done throughout his life: poetry, prose, photography, memoir, all fueled by a love for Italy. Within the OSP community, he is known for “photo-poems,” a daily practice in which images and language overlap, inviting the reader to travel with him across geographies and inward, into self.

In addition to poems and photographs, DREAMS OF THE RETURN also includes intimate personal essays that layer history, memory, and lived experience. In “The Good One,” for example, Alan recounts a walk through Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli with his friend Marco. What begins as a conversation about Jewish philosopher Don Isaac Abravanel and the sacred geography of southern Italy turns into a heartbreaking encounter with a community altar for “o’ Bono”—a young man accidentally killed during a New Year’s Eve celebration. Through this story, Alan reveals how place, tragedy, resilience, and human connection are intertwined in ways both profound and ordinary.

A true perfectionist, Alan (pictured left) worked closely with his good friend, Peter Truskier, to ensure that the photos selected would sparkle in the book just like the locations did in real life.

DREAMS OF THE RETURN is, in effect, another way Alan invites us to travel: through light and verse, through time and place. It’s a book to savor—start with a wind-soft sun, ruins, olive trees and history; consume it slowly with pizza margherita and red wine; linger into the evening with the sweetness of roccoco napoletani and an espresso kissed with Sambuca. You can order a copy of your own here:

order dreams of the return

Compiling My Collection

Published on by dianneP4 Comments

Clearly the owner of that journal is not doing a good job of compiling her collection because on her journal is a slice of orange she is attempting to dry out, three crystals, and a paintbrush. The book is open and written in with a pencil, not good for preserving writing as (being a teacher for one-zillions years I can tell you) pencil smudges overtime to become indecipherable. She’s also got a pile of vintage mail (definitely older and already been mailed to her, to someone), which is deliciously tantalizing, and reading is much easier and more fun than writing.

Who is this mess of a woman? That’s a stock photo, but it could easily be my desk, with a few dozen highlighters and yesterday’s coffee added to the milieu.

It’s difficult for me to have a clean desk, no lie there. It’s difficult for me to spend time cleaning my desk, and not because I am not a neat person, but because I push my own things back. In fact, though I think of myself as a generally nice and “in a good mood” sort of person, I can get snappy when I feel tooo squeezed out.

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

What a great bit of writing that is!

So I have made the bold assertion that I will publish my collection of poetry through Old Scratch Press in 2026. There. I said it to the group, and now I said it to you. I swear I’m gonna do it. I am going to occasionally clean my desk, and push in some room to get my collection together by pushing other things back (other things probably being sleep! Ha!). I just took on a new tutoring student, a few pro bono editing projects (my daughter’s school has a non-profit component to it, and I donated some editing to the auction, and it got bought!), a half dozen or so sample edits, in addition to the regular amount of edits, which is many hundreds of pages per month, and I signed up for a singing course with a friend, have a relative needing assistance for cancer treatments, a teen in need of a lot of “staying on track” help with school work and she is also involved in some theater projects her dad or I need to be the transportation for (and, in general, making sure she eats, remembers her glasses, etc.), and a business to run and a home and family, in addition to trying to squeeze in a daily run. I would love to run well enough to participate in a 5K, and I have been thinking of joining a thing in my neighborhood where I could get a running trainer. Of all of those things I am doing there is nothing I do not want to be doing, except for wishing my relative didn’t have cancer, of course. One friend had told me recently she was stepping back from a project, and I had anticipated it about four months earlier, actually, and I completely get it. My relative, who is staying with me this week and last for her treatments, woke up today and told me she is spending the last few days she needs to be local for her tests at a friend’s because she needs a change of scenery. I had expected that too, and I had prepared a to-go coffee for her before she woke up. However I have a HS friend on FB who is every bit as engaged in politics as I am, and worried about the general state of what we see as the slide into authoritarianism, and another HS classmate said to him, “We liked it better when you just wrote about your kids and scouting. You don’t have a lot of chapters (she actually wrote chapters!) left; don’t waste them on this.” and I could not agree less. Age, chapter of life, has nothing to do with wanting to accomplish things and caring about things outside of ourselves, so, no, I do not think he should stop fighting the good fight. Yet I feel that I do have an understanding that we literally cannot do it all, and don’t want to, and I respect it, and think it is a good thing, and I flatter myself that I am especially good at reading the room, and can see when change is coming. But, I’m not good at, “No.” I’m not good at giving up on something I’ve begun, even if it does not realize my own dream. It’s an obstacle because in order to publish one of my many projects, I assumed I would have to come up with a good, firm, “No.” And I simply can’t. So I have decided instead to come up with a good, slightly quavering, “Yes.” I’m outing myself that I am going to put my damn book out. I am saying it, and affirming it, and treating it, as much as possible, as a done deal. I think if I normalize it, the way I normalize all the other things, I will simply do it because it has a due-date, or a do-date. Both!

And so, here is my question to you:

If you have been writing short stories, short non-fiction, flash, poetry, for some time now (I’m not going to say I’ve been writing for decades, but at least since the synth-pop craze and the resurgence of skinny ties (the best kind of ties)), how do you choose what to include, and what to leave behind, resting, forever lost in a permanent dream state in the “my writing” file on your desktop? Though the synth-pop craze wasn’t what I would describe as a serious time in the world, I was a serious writer; I took myself very seriously, and I think that “me” has somehow stuck around, and I judge that writing to be more profound, when in reality for pretty much all of us our early writing is awful. I remember writing a poem laden with love and portent that was about a page long and contained only the word “baby” written over and over again in different combinations with possessive pronouns and a few sappy adjectives. Songs, when sung, can add meaning through cadence, tone, etc., but, with that “baby” experiment I learned that mere words on a page cannot do that. It was a piece of absolute dreck. I do not regret deleting it!

So, those old pieces hold special meaning for me, but most are not very good (I confess I still think some of them are genius!), and almost all are not even remotely relevant to who I am now. Though I am still a whiny liberal with a moral bent, and that still is there, even in the new pieces.

And this is it, my one chance to publish my poetry, to put it out there in the world. When I was in my MA and MFA programs I knew who the “it” poets were in the world of poets who published, and I wanted to join them, to earn their respect. And as I tried I very much felt borne farther away from them. Primarily by life circumstances and that inability to say no, that pushing back of my own things, more than anything else. And that very much was a tell (an inadvertent behavior or mannerism that betrays) that I didn’t belong among them. Writers who are successful (and success looks different for a poet than a novelist, or self-help book author, etc.) almost all have a modicum of selfishness that allows them to push things away that don’t serve them, and also leads them to self-preserve. They’re not going to be dumb enough to share their “baby” poem with their thesis advisor. Selfishness belongs on the seven deadly sins list, IMHO. But success almost needs it, like a plant needs water, to survive.

So, for better or for worse, committing a deadly sin or not, I am going to get this thing done as if it is not even my thing, so I will not be being selfish; I will simply be doing another job on the list.

But, again, I have this question: if you could put together a collection of your writing (or publish one of your novels, if you write long-form) how do you choose? How do you group? How do you look back over your body of work and say, “This goes; this doesn’t?” And if you could have your book published next year, what would you want on your cover, and why? While working with OSP one thing that has continually surprised me is that the authors seem to know what the cover needs to be. How in the heck….?

So, what about you? Would you know? I’m super curious to hear! Drop me a comment below!

🙂 Dianne

It’s Awkward

Published on by dianneP5 Comments

That’s a photo of my local Trader Joe’s, where I was yesterday buying dog treats and ice cream and flowers and frozen gnocchi. I like Trader Joes. I like it because it is small, and what I mean by small is there are limited choices. I can easily super-overload a cart because I am curious… Ooo, what’s that fruit? I should buy six of those! I like Trader Joe’s because it saves me from that. BUT, I hate checking out there. I HATE IT. Why? It challenges all the introvert things about me. Their checkers are trained? told? naturally? forced to be? chatty!

I am horrible at small talk. I am awkward, and dorky. And I am exhausted afterwards (mentally). I am more a fan of self-checkout, but I do feel like I’m taking someone’s job every time I use one. I long for the A&P days, where the checker was (usually) a woman, and she was too tired on her feet to talk, though she’d smile, and be efficient.

Yesterday the TJ’s was fairly empty, so there was no need for a bagger at my check-out, and I always will bag, but the extra person helps diffuse the awkwardness, because then there’s two people to make annoying small talk with. Usually I end up pulling out my phone to show them a photo of my dog, and they pretend to care. My dog is extra cute though, but I still know we’re all pretending.

Oliver… The Trader Joe’s display photo.

Yesterday the guy checking me out was trying to talk to me, and I was rapidly bagging (I bring huge bags, and try to organize by FREEZER, FRIDGE, PANTRY, but I’ll get desperate to keep up and be done talking, and just start chucking stuff in.). He was trying to talk, but his heart wasn’t in it, and neither was mine because, that checker, he kinda looked like this:

He looked quite a bit like that photo, which is a photo of my brother circa 1978 or so.

That TJs checker looked so much like my brother. A little taller, but otherwise spot on, and I have been checked out by him before, but yesterday it was the light or something, or the quiet between us. I know people not in California think TJs are tripping hazards here, and they’re not. They’re usually a good 20-40 minutes apart, so I kinda wish this guy would get another job. You know what I’m saying? Because there isn’t another TJs close by, and because that checker looks like my brother circa 1978.

My brother died in 2020, in June or July I don’t really want to remember the date. I found out he was dying hours before he did. He was up in a hospital in PA while I was two hours south in DE. Covid was raging, so they were not going to let us come see him. He didn’t have Covid, He had gangrene, probably from a bladder infection he had never fully recovered from, and he didn’t like doctors because they made him feel mortal and dumb, and he hadn’t gone to one for about five months while everything in his body was probably going bananas, and when Covid hit he was really afraid of dying from it, and probably feeling pretty sick most days anyway. My sister-in-law didn’t force him to do anything about it, probably because he was grumpy, and she is an avoider, and they both were potheads and pill heads and whatever when they could get it. They both had a tendency to approach family gatherings with something in their systems to take the edge off of my mother, and, I sometimes think, maybe that is the best way to approach her. Maybe I missed something great about coping there. Which makes me laugh to think of, and would have made my brother laugh his butt off.

My brother was very funny. He raised me to love George Carlin and The Three Stooges. One of the times he most liked in our history together was when he was visiting us in Los Angeles, and I got us all singing narcissistic songs. You take any song that is about romance/lust, etc. and you turn it into a song about yourself. So, Gladys Knight’s classic, “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” becomes [I’M the] “Best Thing That Every Happened to Me.” Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” becomes [When I think about ME] “I Touch Myself.” Get it? We laughed our butts off, and he always talked about it, and we often tried to recreate it, but sometimes with humor the success is situational (you had to be there), and that perfect night was like that. And maybe he was a little high too, and I didn’t know it.

You can’t recreate those perfect moments in life, and trying often leaves you cold. My brother was a great practitioner of trying to recreate the things he loved, trying to hold onto vapor.

Here is his band in the early ’70s:

Bill is in the front right.

So cute. And here they are in the late 2010s:

Bill is in the front left.

Bill is gone, but the ones who are still here are still playing together at the bars local to Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. Most of those guys, living and dead, never got their shit quite all the way together. They could always play, and play well, but they were still partying like the Rolling Stones circa 1968. And maybe still being able to get out there and rock the house is a sort of having it together that’s just a bit different from how I would define it.

I miss my brother, and it’s awkward to have a checker at TJs remind me of him so completely that it renders me unable to make small talk or even flash the photo of my dog. My brother had a lope-y way of walking not unlike Shaggy in Scooby Doo, and this guy moves like that. It’s awkward because grief is awkward and comes casually loping up behind you at the most unexpected times. Someone told me grief is a metal ball in the glass jar of your life, and as you move away from the time of your loss the jar gets bigger, but the ball is permanently there, and rolls around, bumping up against everything, sometimes quietly, sometimes banging the glass hard enough that you think it will crack. Poetry is a very helpful receptacle for grief. I think poetry works well because it is often short, and emotional, and vague, not pinning grief down to a specific grief style or emotion or reason. Poetry might move the ball away from the glass, or give you a little breathing room when your lungs have constricted so much you feel like your ribs have laced up extra tight around them. My favorite brother poem has long been this one, and was so even before my brother winked so quickly out of existence.

But today I found another one. It loosens up the tight ribs too, if by loosening them you mean jabbing an ice pick in there. But ice pick or not, it does what it’s supposed to do, connects you directly to the pain, so you can feel it, instead of dodging it all the time. Then you can move on with your life, even as the brother you miss cannot move on with his, which feels supremely unfair to me, and I really value being fair, so there’s that. But for that day, that moment, at least, you can get back to what you were doing that you are doing because your life is still going. This poem is by William E. Stafford, and is called “Brother.”

We’re so lucky The Poetry Foundation exists, and has this database of poems just waiting to tend to our needs.

If someone gave you some paper, scissors, glue, rocks, crayons, clay, wire, papier-mâché, bowling balls, aluminum foil, fabric scraps, paint, sea glass, what would you create? What would your sculpture of grief look like? What medium would you use? What shape would you make? If you were only allowed eight words, one for each day in a week and one extra just in case, what words would you write? How would you arrange them? Would they be poetry, lyrics, a string of obscenities lobbed at the world, or a short burst of prose? Would they be quiet, loud, or snap, crackle, and pop? And would you want them to tighten up your ribs, or let them loose? Could you share it with the world or would it be too awkward for prime time?

Some of us come to that hard, clinking, lurking ball-bearing version of grief mercifully later in life than others. The less time you have to carry it the better: it means you had a longer shot at joy. But it finds us all eventually. I think that when we’re younger we grieve for ourselves: all the things we haven’t put into place yet that we long for, all the things we want to be that we just haven’t attained. As we get older, from any point in space because we all live at our own pace, we grieve more for others, and our missed opportunities to be with them. But Bill was. He lived. I had a brother.

Sometimes Being a Witness Is All You Can Do

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Picture courtesy Eric Cruz Lopez

I live in Los Angeles, and it’s been a little bit unnerving to see what is on the news about us. 

When I first moved to Los Angeles I lived in Venice Beach, on the Westside, by the Pacific Ocean. Venice Beach is beautiful, and weird, and has been heavily gentrified even since I lived there, and is now almost evenly split between people living in three million dollar homes, and people living in tents. It’s a problem on both ends of that financial situation. Of course, can you imagine being homeless? You would pitch a tent in a minute if you could, and you would definitely want to be in a temperate climate where people were laid-back, and where there were a lot of other people just like you around, to make you feel less obvious, and safer. I watched a video just yesterday about people who have chosen to live in vehicles (cars, campers) not in Venice Beach, but in the USA, and how they (being very digital) will meet up and hang out in different free camping areas to have a community. And why would people without homes be any different?

Los Angeles has a homeless, or unhoused, people problem. 

Los Angeles, and all of Southern California, has a lot of immigrants. Many of them are legal immigrants, some are illegal. Some are only here for work. Many want to get enough money through work here to send home to family in order to eventually rejoin family. I have met many people with that plan from Asian countries and countries south of the USA. Those folks are not wanting to live here forever. They’re trying to make enough money that everyone can live well, back home. But there is no mechanism for that of any workable consequence here in the USA. The visas for work are not for waiters and day laborers. The visas for work are for IT people and doctors, that sort of person. In Los Angeles we know that the Uber driver, the waiter, the grass cutter, is probably not here legally, and not intending to stay. We get it, and I think, for the most part, we’re happy to have the low-cost help.

Then there are other people who want to stay: people who came here fleeing violence, people who came here as babies and have only known here, people who came here as students and experienced so much prosperity and freedom compared to life back home that they don’t want to go back. As Americans we cannot really understand how different life can be, especially for the very poor, and women in general, in other countries, even countries like China or India that we might see as very western. When we were in China (my husband Dave and I) to adopt our daughter in 2009 we met our daughter at our hotel, a huge, lovely hotel, about twenty floors or so, and absolutely where the wealthy and foreigners stayed. As soon as my daughter was placed in my arms I lost the ability to sleep, and so I spent the long nights in the hotel hanging out in the bathroom, so I didn’t wake up Dave and daughter, and it had a floor to ceiling glass window next to the shower, and I could see right down the main street of Nanchang. Next to us was another tall building, and each balcony had laundry and sausages hanging off of it. And if we were on flour fourteen of the hotel, it was probably floor eleven of the apartment building that was completely blown out. I don’t know what had happened there, but it was rubble like you might see in a Tom Cruise movie. And above it, and below it, the balconies had laundry and sausages hanging. Rain or dry, explosion, crumbled concrete or not, the balconies had laundry and sausages hanging. And on the streets, during the day, scores of people stood over lit barrels boiling eggs to sell, any kind of egg you could possibly want: quail, chicken, duck, and probably more I am too American to think of. The eggs came in all shapes and sizes, and the egg vendors huddled over the steamy pots trying to stay warm. 

When we went into Nanchang from the airport we started first driving (in the passenger van with the other parents) through marsh, wetlands, dark and stinky, Then the marsh started having bits of high and dry land, and as soon as those appeared, there were tents and carboard shacks on them: people were living there. And as we progressed on (it was a long drive from the airport) there were more shacks. As the land got more livable the shacks got a little bigger, and then there were small villages with tiny crumbling houses, and then towns, and finally cities, and Nanchang was a huge city with underpasses and overpasses and pedestrian tunnels due to there being too much traffic on the eight-lane streets for people to cross safely. And in Nanchang the people lived stacked up twenty stories high in little efficiency apartments where their clothes and their dinner hung outside in the high breeze all year long, hot, cold, wet, dry, frozen or not. In Nanchang the city was so full and so busy that even at three in the morning there was a constant cacophony of car horns blaring below me, way below, fourteen stories below, in the street. The noise was significant, even up as high as I was. It was bumper to bumper car lights all night long. The bathtub in my bathroom was deep, and the hot water was endless, and I could soak and secretly watch the entire world below, all night long as I worried I was going to suck as a parent.

The day after we got our daughter we took the van across the street. The street was so large and so busy we had to take the van to safely get across, and we went to the “adopt your child here” building, which was easily fifteen stories high itself. I remember my ears popping as we rode the elevator up. When we got to the “this is where you give the boxed ginseng from Pennsylvania and sign the forms” floor we got off. It was freezing cold on that floor, and there were no electric lights turned on, so it was fairly dim, on a rainy forty degrees day, as we dipped our thumbs in red ink and signed our papers severing our child from one nation and attaching her to another. Each clerk we dealt with was wearing a winter coat and gloves with the fingertips cut out, over their business suits. I felt, in all honesty, both so lucky, and also that I had saved my tiny daughter from a hard life.

Dave and I ate Chinese food (of course we did) eagerly and with relish the whole time we were there, but there was one afternoon where I had been dragging Dave and our baby daughter exploring around, that we were just tired, and we went to a McDonalds in an eight-story shopping mall. I remember it was elevators only, and people were always waiting, and they would literally leap over you to get in. I think we waited at least three times to get on. When we got off and made our way to the McDonalds the line was about two blocks from the restaurant door. It moved quickly, and as we went inside I saw that they had the tables McDonalds had had when I was a kid, like cafeteria tables with immovable swivel chairs attached. Each chair had three people sitting on it. Let that sink in. One small hard plastic swivel chair, and three butts. Yes, butts in China are very much smaller than in the USA, and that tells you something right there that has nothing to do with genetics.

I remember when all of us (all across the world) who had submitted our paperwork in March of 2005 were talking in a Yahoo group about everything China-adoption related. It was common for people from the same month to design a t-shirt to wear in China so that they could spot each other (as if white people with Asian babies wasn’t enough of a clue). And I remember a whole passel of American members got up in arms because our group wanted a rainbow on the shirt, and those up in arms didn’t because they did not want to be associated with anything “gay.” And I remember thinking, in that moment, as if a lightning bolt had hit me, You may have been able to check a box for a gender preference, but even that wasn’t a guarantee, and what if your child turns out gay? Are you not open to whoever your child turns out to be? It wasn’t the first or last time the adoption process has taught me lessons about how little control I have in life. But what really hit me then was how it made me view those parents-to-be both as dumb, and unkind. 

If you have not experienced life in a place with real poverty, you cannot imagine what people would do to get their families out of it.  Could you sit all day in the cold, trying to sell your steaming eggs alongside hundreds of other people steaming eggs, baby tied to your back, little dog on a newspaper on the ground, everyone trying to stay warm and have enough to eat?

Los Angeles is okay, folks. It’s fine today, and it was fine last week, even with the homeless and all the immigrants of varying status. It’s actually a place where, rich or impoverished, people are generally in a good mood and kind and a heck of a lot more pleasant than my Philly neighbors used to be. (No disrespect Philly; you’re a great town, and you have your reasons.) We’re not bothered by immigrants at all. We are bothered, in many different ways, by some homes costing three million and some homes being cardboard shacks like in the marsh in China. But the current administration is not helping us with either of those problems. And it is potentially creating a lot more that we don’t need or deserve simply because most of us in this county voted for the Black woman. 

But in this moment, what difference can I make? What can I do to help? 

It is another hard lesson to learn that sometimes the only thing to do is to witness, to see, and to report back, honestly, on what you saw. There are many things that feel out of control right now, and many that you, also, probably want to stop, even if your list isn’t the same as mine. Take a picture, with your phone, camera, or mind, and share it. Write it down, make a picture with your words. Share it, and accept other people’s experiences too. You’re not playing fair if yours are the only right ones. 

The reason I wrote this post is not because of what is happening in Los Angeles, actually. It is because my fellow member and friend Nadja shared The Gaza Poets Society Substack with me. When Hamas kidnapped those people from Israel it hit me in the heart. I’m of an age that indicates that I, and my fellow kids of the 70s and 80s, were raised on The Diary of Anne Frank as a big thing in school, and I went on, as a child, to order many other Holocaust-related books from the Scholastic catalogue. I read so many that I sometimes couldn’t sleep as I tried to plan how I would help my family escape from the Nazis (and I’m not Jewish by nationality or religion). And the first book I edited professionally was a Holocaust memoir. I just felt that Jewish people needed a place to be safe from the rest of us, and the kidnappings in 2023 underlined that. 

But in college I read an interview with Yassar Arafat that changed how I thought about Palestinians. Though I still felt that Jewish people needed a place to be safe, I began to see that Palestinians also needed a place. Since the kidnappings happened in 2023, it’s been hard to watch the fallout. But, like the administration sending Marines we don’t need to Los Angeles to try and break it, there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about what the kidnappings unleashed.

Still it is important to know, to witness, to not turn your eyes away from something because it’s intractable, no matter what you think or feel is truth. And so I wanted to find a way, in this post, to share that Substack with you. The poetry is both well-written and moving. And as all writers share the feeling of “writing into the void,” I think the one thing we could give them is eyes on the page. It doesn’t mean we turn our back on one group for another. It does mean we take a look at all that is going on in the world of poetry. People in the USA often say, in the years since 2016, that not everything is political. But that is not true by a long shot. There is a reason some people in China shiver in a cardboard house in a marsh and some shiver next to a pot of boiling eggs in an actual metropolis. There is a reason why some people died of Covid and others did not. And in the USA, where most of us in this group are, the people in the nation do not (as a sweeping generalization, of course: so many shades of grey) easily understand how dangerous and revolutionary poetry often is in the rest of the world. Revolutionary precisely because it is a way of witnessing. 

It seems not at all odd, to me, to hear that bombs are falling in Gaza, to see it on the news. Sadly it doesn’t shock me at all. But it does shock me to hear that there has been a mass shooting in Austria, and it does shock me to see that Marines are in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a matter of degree, of what narratives and images we are accustomed to versus those we are not. 

As for what you see on the news, that’s not what I’m experiencing here, though I can hear helicopters for twenty-four hours now. It would take me about an hour, in good traffic, to get to where the news is taking its pictures, and it’s important to understand there is no one photo that can give you a true picture of all of Los Angeles. Can you imagine that it might be the same in other parts of the country and the world too?

Keep your spirits up, however you can. My recipe is potato chips, coffee, crosswords, and walking the dog. Check out the poetry on The Gaza Poets Society Substack. And don’t stop witnessing.

Let’s Get Titular

Published on by diannePLeave a comment

Above you see Don Paterson’s take on the titular poem, with a poem where the title is the whole poem.

A titular poem is a poem where the title is part of the poem, a line in it. In my own poetry I have really liked using this device, and often use my titles as the last line of the poem, the conclusion to the whole action of the poem. I have been described by my teachers as a narrative and magical realist poet. In my defense against these allegations I will let you know that I grew up listening to songs like “Jolene,” by Dolly Parton, “Ruby,” by Kenny Rodgers, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot, “Dark Lady” by Cher, and the oddest one of all, “Angie Baby,” by Helen Reddy. My formative years were two-to-three decades of songs with strange narratives in them. It isn’t my fault!

I have written many titular poems, some remarkably more successful than others, but I will share with you today one that is probably my personal favorite. This was written when I was in graduate school for my first writing degree. I had moved back in with my family. My house was helmed by two working parents, both too ready to have a drink, both too generous with money and not much else, and both not great at respecting boundaries. But I was able to go to school for my Master’s Degree and teach at the school part time, which pretty much took up 10 hours of each day, but made about one third of what a person needed for rent in those days, so, without my old room, I never could have done it. There were a lot of challenges though, one of which was a mother who was threatened by education, and really tried to impede it even as she envied it. My most repeated story, and least believed, was the one where I went up to my room to work on a paper due the next day that had to be twenty-five pages. My mother burst in to the room, my dad in tow, and began to lay out sheets of wallpaper over my (yes, I’m not kidding) word processor and desk. “We’re wallpapering the bathroom,” my mother announced.
“What, now? Tonight? It’s seven,” I said in disbelief.
“We have to do it now,” she said. “Right Vince?” My dad looked at me and shrugged. What could I do? I went downstairs, and waited. They finished a little after eleven, and I finished the paper a little after four the next morning. Yes, I should have probably written it sooner, but that aside, who competes with their kid with wallpaper? Sigh. No one I shared my graduation program with ever believed my stories. So, one day I wrote this poem to see if it could explain it to my fellow authors that my stories were true. As you read the poem remember… this is a titular poem, so see if you can understand how the title works as the title, and also as the last line of the poem. Yes, there are obscenities in the poem that some may find offensive. I’m a salty old girl, and, once, I was a salty young one.

A Few Dry Old Peas Rattling Around In A Waxed Paper Dixie Cup

Jesus fucking Christ goes through my mind as I sit here,
trying to read the poems from my poetry workshop,
and my brother, who doesn’t live here,
appears suddenly at the front window
like an unwelcome trio of Jehova’s Witnesses,
causing my dog,
who had just been whining at my leg for my bagel
to bark loudly and repeatedly at the window as
the phone rings, making me jump like a bean,
and I answer it,
all the while looking in exasperation at my beloved bother of a brother,
who is unaware that I am here,
and if he comes in the house will joke,
as if he were the opening act for the Jerry Lewis Telethon,
“Still in your pajamas? Ah you and that school racket,”
while I say, “Hello” the the phone with my voice
trying to sound
pointed
and
pissed
and my mother’s voice says,
“Read me what the calendar says my dentist appointment is,”
and says,
“I know you’d like nothing better than to put my wash
in the dryer—how ’bout it?”
and says,
“Don’t just sit around; do your windows,”
and says,
“You’re home todays so I won’t be home to let the dogs out,”
although she wants to be
’cause she thinks I don’t do it right,
and tells me again how to do it before she hangs up,
but my brother has not come in, has disappeared, so I go back to reading
for two seonds because here comes the dog again,
whine whine bagel bagel scratch me, and I stamp at her;
she looks at me—Big whoop—says her scroungy toothless expression,
and I hear a loud banging, so I look up and a strange truck,
a truck that would have turned up the noses
of Sanford and Son
and a man who obviously was designed with the truck in mind,
are in the driveway,
and he is pulling a gigundous lawnmower
off the truck while I try to think and come up with
Jesus, shit! Don’t unload that! Did I ask for that thing?!
and Who the fuck is this toothless guy? and wonder
for a scared second
if he’s a relative I don’t recognize
which is usual for me,
when I see my brother coming ’round the side of the truck
and I run upstairs thinking, What the hell is that guy here for?
Bill is going to bring this strange man to see me
in my pajamas, and the dog is lifting off the floor now
in little hydraulic barks—I am thinking
Christ Bill, now you’re going to wake Lee and I
am giving up on reading poetry; I’ll write some instead,
and I retreat to my room and start typing trying
to ignore the barking of slamming truck parts and lawnmowers out front,
but I am right,
my brother does wake my sister, and when she gets up,
by opening her door she releases another dog to bark,
and it runs downstairs to join in, eager to catch up,
while my sister
walks into the bathroom and pees loudly with the door open,
and does not flush,
puts on striped spandex, and goes tour-de-fourcing
down the stairs where, like a swift grifter,
she switches out the tape in the VCR for an aerobics tape and turns it
up
up
“Lift ’em up! That’s grrrreat! You can do it!”
but I can’t do it
because I can still hear my brother and Mister May-Be-A-Relative,
so I am able to hear another voice added to theirs
as my mother says, “Oh, I wondered if you’d be here.
I just came home to let the dogs out,” and my friends wonder
why I’m tense and why I never want to visit the zoo,
and I think,
Dad must be coming home any minute to tell us all the jokes
he’s heard today, like, “Duck walks into a pharmacist,
says gimmee a Chapstick and put it on my bill,”
or the one about the Avon lady who farts in a elevator,
after which he will laugh that long, wheeze, Lou Costello laugh
“Hey Abbott”
and somehow,
in this rapidly escalating cacophony,
a small sound,
like a maraca gently shaken,
is in my ears
pulling me to it,
causing me to think one final thought at the end of my morning study time,
because,
pricklingly familiar,
I think I’ve heard that small hollow sound before, and I think
I now know exactly what my brain is like.

Did you make it to the end? Could you see how the titular title ended the poem? I must admit I’ve always felt that the title must work as the title, of course, but should also resonate at the end of a poem, because our eyes, having reached the end, especially of a long poem, will zip back up to the top to refresh, remind us of what we were reading in the first place.

Have you ever written a titular poem? If so, I’d love to have you share it in the comments. Have you ever read one that you especially liked, or that flummoxed you? Let me know.

All these years later, through many different rounds of education at many schools, through being a life-long adjunct: always running place-to-place, through infertility and a trip to China to become a mother, through a few trips back and forth across the country with a full car and a moving van, through working with so many different and wildly talented authors, I do still feel a bit like I’m a plate-spinner with a brain that might like a long vacation on a deserted island.
Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll share back something titular.~ Dianne

Dianne Pearce is the publisher and main editor at Current Words Publishing. She also designs and formats each issue of INSTANT NOODLES LIT MAG, and had to learn how to work computers to do it!

Don’t miss the second submission period for INSTANT NOODLES 2025. Submit today!

Where Oh Where Can Your Work Be Found?

Published on by diannePLeave a comment

Oh my goodness, I love The Kinks!

And I bring them up today because when I was thinking about writing this blog post, I was also thinking about all the other blog posts I had to write today, which has turned out to be at least 4, plus the social media to go with it. It reminded me of this Kinks’ classic:

Give it a listen because: The Kinks.

And so that you get the tune, which is important to this post.

My blogging and posting activity made me think of this song because it aligns with my thoughts: She posts it here; she posts it there: on Instagram, and everywhere! She will just keep posting ’till her fingertips go numb ’cause she’s a dedicated marketer of books. Oh yes she is! Oh yes she is! Oh yes she is! Oh yes she is!

Sing it with me.

Are you posting here, and there?

I hope you don’t mind if I remind you of the three Ps of posting: personality, process, and product. You want to sell your books, but you have to find people who know about your book: people in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Portland. Have you thought of it that way? Imagine a 25 mile readius (hah! Gotcha! Radius!) around you: that’s probably where people are going to know you enough to buy your book. Imagine your social tree: your family, your friends, friends of your family, and friends of your friends, your co-workers, and your fellow attendees at church or hobbies or etc. Of those people, how many will buy a book? Of the people who buy it, how many will read it? How good is your elevator pitch to tell people about it? How “clean” is your book in terms of proofreading, editing, font choice and size, plot holes? And if you do not live in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, or Portland, how will anyone who does find out about your book and become intersted in it?

With my deepest apologies, you have to post. You have to blog. You blog the most about you, the human, you blog next about the process and proceedures of you, the writer, and lastly you make an open, not subtle, appeal on your product: “You will enjoy this book because….”

Let’s imagine a 30 day grid.

Luckily, with most websites, and certainly with WordPress, you can post them all on the same day if you like, and schedule them to go out.

Friends, if you are unknown, there is no other way to get your book out there. There is no other way.

Most of us are doing the, “La la la la I can’t hear you!” thing when I say this. But, tell me, how else does that reader in Peoria find you?

I interacted with a young author the other day whose horror novel won some book award. I asked her, “Have you posted that on the FB horror reading groups?”

“No,” she replied to me in the women’s writers group. “Those groups are fake, so I don’t waste my time.”

They most certianly are not fake, and if you’re writing horror, you oughta be on them. If you’re writing poetry or short form, are you looking for groups where people are reading those books? And the people in the women’s writers group are not buying her book, because they want to sell their book, not buy hers, but all of them are pitching to the wrong damn audience.

I am so very sorry to need to be the one who tells you Santa ain’t real.

In my experience coaching and attempting to help so many authors, from the ones I taught in college to the ones in that womens’ group, to the ones I publish in Instant Noodles, and on up, authors spend their free time writing their next book or story or poem, and then work their jobs, interact with their families, have some down time, etc. But small business owners never stop. They ask you to buy their newest T-shirt, or their revolutionary toilet paper, or come into their small shop, every single day, and they work overtime if they need to, to get it done.

If you’re a hobbiest writer, enjoy! If you want to go pro… you need to put in the practice hours, which, for this, are posting.

So sing it with me!

I post it here; I post it there: on Instagram, and everywhere! I promise I’ll keep posting ’till my fingertips go numb ’cause I’m a dedicated author of my books. Oh yes I is! Oh yes I is! Oh yes I is! Oh yes I is! And nothing can stop me, and my blog will not go mum ’cause I’m a dedicted author of my books. ‘Cause I’m a dedicted author of my books. ‘Cause I’m a dedicted author of my books!!! Ba-da-da!

🙂

Keep posting! You can do it!

The Blessings of Ritual and Routine

Published on by diannePLeave a comment
My dearly departed guinea pig, Addie, in her warm fuzzy hidey. Addie was carmel and white and had lovely pink eyes. Really, pink.

Just before the pandemic (the 2020s I feel the need to say for when we all are history), we were in search of a better situation for our daughter, and we moved her to a private school. She went from a class of 30 to a class of 12, and her academics improved immediately, though our finances did not! As a part of her classroom they had an animal student, the lovely Miss Addie pictured above lounging in her hidey with a tasty piece of bamboo. The school asked for a volunteer family to take her home over the Christmas break, and we volunteered. Addie and I bonded immediately (I am the pet-whisperer), and I must admit I delayed sending her back to school in January by almost a full week. When the school was shut down over Covid in March they asked me again if I would take her, and I eagerly said yes. She moved in with us, and by May the lovely school announced it was going out of business. Addie became family. During the stay-home days our daughter took courses on Outschool (highly recommend) where she learned female guinea pigs preferred to be in pairs. We then adopted Baby from a pet store. It turned out that Addie did not prefer to be in pairs, but eventually a tolerance developed.

When we moved back to California, again for a better school experience for our daughter, we drove across with two cats, two guinea pigs, and one dog. About a year after we settled in, I woke up a few days before Christmas to find Addie had left us. Baby, it turned out, was desperate not to be alone, and went on a hunger strike. After a forcing some food into her for two days (guinea pigs must eat constantly or they die), we adopted Punky (who looks a bit like a pumpkin). This past summer Baby followed Addie to Valhalla, and I saw, stretched before me, a long line of guinea pig adoptions for the rest of my life. I waited with bated breath until, lo and behold, it seemed Punky took after Addie, bless her. She seemed very interested in checking out Baby’s viewing and memorial, but then she was fine to have all the snacks and seed balls and pigetti (corn silk) to herself. She moves, in her luxuriously large cage, from hidey to hidey during the day, alternatively napping and yapping. She has a lot to say to me, and we perform a call and response between us where I say, “Woooo, Punkus!” and she chirps away back at me, whooping louder and louder until I bring her some fantastic treat.

The guinea pigs, as much as I don’t want to have a long line of them stretching to the end of my life in front of me, are part of my life’s rituals, and I love the job, and someday I know I will mourn the loss of it, as I mourn both the beautiful, pink-eyed Addie, and Baby, who looked like a tiny Holstein. Every other morning, without fail, I awake before the sun and the rest of my family, chat away with Punky as I remove all her bedding (I use cloth bedding, nice fluffy fleece pads), and all her hay, and all her snacks and poops, and I clean out the cage. All the linens go into the washer for a hot wash and an extra rinse, and the cage is refitted with clean bedding from my ample supply. Then I top off the snack bin (hay rings, seed balls, vitamin C chews), put in fresh hay, and add in some salad (lettuce, peppers, fresh baby corn, that sort of thing) and set Punky up for her new day. It takes me about 40 minutes (not counting the laundry time) and during that time I do not have to think what move to make next, and my conversation (Wooo Punkus!) pretty much doesn’t change, and is not the most thought provoking. That gives me some early-morning time to freshen up my brain as I freshen up Punky’s cage. We both enjoy it. For me it is both calming, and nurturing as I nurture my little Punky, and there is a clear sense of accomplishment in looking at the “beautiful once again” cage. 

Of course, you might think, that’s a lot of work, lady, for a kid’s pet, work that the kid should be doing. My daughter and I traded years ago because, when Addie first moved in, my daughter was too short to clean the cage, and not very quick or proficient at it. I offered to trade emptying the dishwasher (a chore I despise). She agreed. So now she’s stuck with it! And I get the meditative and soothing time with Punky.

I want to address this next paragraph to my fellow non-believers out there, or, perhaps, non-conventional believers is a better term. I was raised really immersed in a traditional Christian church, but, as long as I can remember, though I didn’t really balk against going until late into my HS years, it had no effect on me. I didn’t click into the whole thing. I often read the Bible in church from boredom during the long services, but it came across as fairy tale to me, and the emotions I saw people experience in church were not there for me. Even during my beloved grandmom’s funeral, who loved her church dearly, what I remember feeling, aside from loss, was that I would have preferred to be somewhere else, somewhere emotionally warm, to hold her in my thoughts. I have no doubt that my delight of a grandma is somewhere, in some form, still being a delight, but hooking it into her own religious beliefs is beyond me. So, there are two points I want to make here about that based on my experiences in life: ritual, which is done so well by churches/temples/mosques, and their like, is not owned by them. And life needs ritual for space to process and to get in touch with emotions. We are all different, and some of us need more ritual in life than others, and that ritual can be as simple as how we decorate for holidays, certain meals we make at certain times, celebrating our own birthdays (of course! I’m glad I was born!). Ritual is, really, meditation, and for me it is more profound when it is a natural thing in my life rather than what I would view as a forced, arbitrary movement. The guinea pigs are a delight too. Their personalities remind me of my chubby grandma in many ways. She often whooped, and loved eating too. There’s no reason they should not be connected in my heart and in my thoughts. I love the ritual that they are.

And during the “mundane chore” of cleaning the guinea pig cage I get a lot of writing done (in my mind, not on my computer!). It’s a reset for me as well. There’s no pressure for perfection, and the thoughts roll in and out like a calm tide. 

Of course Princess Punky will not outlast me (I am optimistic enough to assume). And I want to just mention my second very early morning ritual that will ride with me to the bitter end. OHHHHHHH…….

All I want is a proper cup of coffee
Made in a proper copper coffee pot
I may be off my dot but I want a proper coffee
In a proper copper pot
Iron coffee pots and tin coffee pots
They are no use to me
If I can't have a proper cup of coffee
In a proper copper coffee pot, I'll have a cup of tea!

Gaze upon my magnificent second morning ritual… coffee made in a proper copper coffee percolator! A percolator has several ritual benefits: there are a few parts to take apart and clean; there is a prescribed way to put it back together, and when it is back together it moans suggestively and bubbles, and scents the air with perfume Chanel should be envious of. It is another opportunity for me to do labor that requires no brain power, that pleases me and affects me directly while also giving benefit to someone else (my spouse), and doing the “chore” brings about visible results that please me. It also offers me a hot cup to sip and enjoy as I slowly move from meditation to sitting down and writing out this post, or some other writing project.

Websters says that a blessing, as a noun, is grace (the thing said before meals), approval or encouragement, or a thing conducive to happiness or welfare (by which I take it Websters means well-being). Rituals are a blessing. And, for me, a lot of my blessings are my routines. I exhort you not to deny yourself of the blessing of your routines, even if they are “chores” (such a dirty word!). Slow them down a bit; use them to slow your thoughts, and plum the richness of repetition, a moment with no planning and no management needed, a moment on autopilot. There are so many writing gems to be found there, as well as quite a lot of balm for the nervous system. Enjoy that walk with your dog, scritches for kitty, a hot cup of coffee, or, if you can’t have a proper cup of coffee, a hot cup of tea. 😉 Whoop whoop!