Po(sey) Sessions

I am so lucky today. Why? you ask. Well, 5 boxes of books greeted me at the front door. And what was in one of those boxes? THIS... Now let me just say, I LOVE THIS COVER. I don't know why, but I do. Maybe the millions of stars. (Did you guys see the two planets up there last night. Thanks to my boyfriend who made me aware of them!) So, I decided just to peak in and take a little look. This is what I found: "My parent's Ford wagon hit a concrete divider on U.S. 95 outside Biddeford, Maine, in August 1990. They'd driven that stretch of highway for maybe thirty years, on the way to Long Lake. Some guy who used to play baseball with Pop had these cabins by the lake and had named them for his children. Jenny. Al. Tyler. Craig. Bugs. Alice and Sam. We always got Alice for two weeks in August, because it had the best waterfront, with a shallow, sandy beach, and Mom and Pop could watch us while they sat in the green Adirondack chairs. We came up even after Bethany h...

So, topsurf has a blog now . We should celebrate. How? I am going to tell all of you, and especially her to go out and read this book! It is all about magic and the places you can go when you believe in it. The Van Gogh Cafe by Cynthia Rylant. Rylant has always been one of my favorite writers for kids. Have you read any of her books? What did you think?

It Pours! So, Megan, why aren't you posting? Well at first I was busy and not reading, and then I didn't feel like reading and then I was reading a got a computer virus and I am still running on a back up computer, which I call The Beasty Box because it is so slow. And then I got an ear infection and now I am not feeling so well again. On top of just the general slow down I get every winter. So, what have you been reading lately? I have been working on a series of interviews Bill Moyers did with poets called Fooling With Words. I just started skimming it from the beginning again and exploring the poets a little more in depth and listening to interviews and stuff. Do you like poetry? Do you have a favorite poet? (This entry was brought to you by my annoying friend Topsurf.)

What was the last book you bought? A Single Shard Name a book you have read MORE than once I tend not to re-read books. There are just many more out there that need to be read it seems like a waste to keep reading the same ones. I always say that I don't re-read books and then in the middle of the night I remember that one book that I HAVE re-read, but of course I currently have no idea what it is. Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it? Not that I can recall. Not that it hasn't happened, or maybe it has just happened SO MANY TIMES! There are always times when you your life through the lens of the book you are reading. How do you choose a book? eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews ? The cover and recognition of the author's name combined with the price is the biggest factor when I am book buying. Sometimes the title just grabs my attention too. I buy 90% of all my books from the used market. I am alway...

Thirteen reasons I haven't blogged this week. 1. New poetry blog 2. Story time at the library. Best book read: Fall Is Not Easy 3. 5 year old got her own library card . We have been making good use of it 4. Too many post ideas but not the time or the inclination to complete them. They are just floating there, in my head. 5. I have mostly only been reading picture books and poetry. 6. After getting A Bad Case of Stripes as a reading book from school, 5 year old decided it was the BEST BOOK EVER! It needs to be read at least 3 times daily, and there are a lot of words on each page. 7. My 5 year old locked me/us out of my bedroom and I do not have access to my current book selections. I had to sleep in the basement on the spare bed, instead of in my own last night. 8. 9. Too much house cleaning that should be getting done and despite my lack of blogging, still isn't. 10. Meals to cook. The horrid life of being mommy! 11. archive.org Searching for interesting audio. Especia...

The past few days have felt like an endless void. I have not been reading, I have not had the desire to read. I pushed through a little bit of The Girl Who Loved Tome Gordon and Prayer for Owen Meany, but it felt more like an exercise in futility than anything resembling enjoyment. I know in part I am just not reading the type of books that are speaking to me. What do you do when you don't feel like reading? I have also been reading a little bit of poetry to help with my current endeavor of writing a poem a day for the next 30 days . Today is day 5 and I have not written my poem yet. Do you like poetry? Do you like to write it, read it, or listen to it? Of the three I think I like to listen to it the best. I love to listen to Garrison Keillor read a poem every day on The Writer's Almanac . On Tuesday I wrote about a book I was reading and the connection it had to William Blake's poem "The Tyger". When I came across the following poem shortly after, it real...

Comic Book Tattoo is a collection of fifty-some stories, each connected with one of Tori Amos’s songs, and sometimes only tangentially. Each story is prefaced with the lyrics by which it was inspired, and though the book itself is 480 pages, each story is short, coming in under fifteen pages. They’re not exactly novel-length, then, but many of the artists have done incredible things in creating worlds within those confines. “They were stories packed dense and twisted tight, all gears and curls and knots and fragments. I would listen to her songs and I would want to imagine. She made me dream. I listened to her songs and I created stories,” writes Neil Gaiman in his introduction. That sentiment is precisely what Comic Book Tattoo is about -- the songs, and the stories they create. Of course, it’s one of the points of stories, too -- the places that might otherwise go unseen, the moods and dreamworlds sometimes forgotten. (Above excerpted from Bookslut ) Dave Navarro's Spread TV :...