Sometimes I go to sleep with my heart full of sadness. A student’s poem that day about a bicycling daughter killed by a bus as it made a turn, someone’s essay about losing her son to a strep infection that went to his heart, and someone else’s essay about grieving the mother she had and … Continue reading
Sheila is talking with new Port Townsend resident and writer Marcia Myers, whose coffee table books include Special Delivery, an interesting, illustrated history of the US Postal Service. Visit Marcia Myers Publishing on Facebook. … Continue reading
[This article appeared first in April, 2012.] April is National Poetry Month. Feeling a little badly that I hadn’t started new poems to celebrate the month, I decided to look through old files in a computer folder labeled “archived poems.” I had completely forgotten some of the drafts I’d created. When I read them, I … Continue reading
How do we move our writing and characters in time and space without slowing our readers down and certainly without confusing them? We must learn to stop doing what I call “taking the reader down the hall,” filling in the whole journey, every bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling and every crack in the … Continue reading
Sheila talks with poet Holly J. Hughes about her poetry and her teaching career as a writer. (Originally recorded on November of 2014) … Continue reading
[The following article in honor of National Poetry Month appeared in slightly different form in March of 2003.] John Keats created the term “negative capability,” the idea that a poem holds within it one thing as well as its opposite. For example, when we eulogize someone’s death, we also celebrate their life. When we ache … Continue reading