Sage Said So

A Cup of Comfort anthology series reading and book signing

When: Wednesday, June 25, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

What:
A Cup of Comfort is a bestselling anthology (book) series featuring uplifting true stories about the experiences and relationships that inspire and enrich our lives. These slice-of-life stories are written by people from all walks of life and provide unique personal insights into powerful universal truths.

This reading and book signing event, hosted by the Barnes & Noble Reading Series, will feature authors from the four most recent releases:

Cup of Comfort for Writers
Cup of Comfort for Single Mothers
Cup of Comfort for Dog Lovers
Cup of Comfort for Horse Lovers

Readers will include Sharyn Bolton, Sage Cohen, LouAnn Edwards, Lori Maliszewski,  Minnette Meador, Kimila Kay Setzer, Valetta Smith, Deanna Stollar, Samantha Waltz, and series editor Colleen Sell.

We'd love to see you there!

"I just knew"

This is what my friends would say when pressed for explanations about how they chose their husbands and partners. I always found this to be an entirely unsatisfying answer.

"But HOW did you know? What made you so certain?" My desire to comfortably navigate the unknown often expresses itself in trying to understand phenomena beyond articulation.

"I just KNEW." Clearly, this was some kind of insider club code that I was not likely to penetrate. There were no strategies I could mimic, no best practices I could adopt. Just some ambiguous intuiting that seemed available to every other person on the planet but me.

And thus I spent many, many years in many not-so-happy relationships, not-knowing--and wondering when that lightning bolt would strike.

Then last year a mutual friend introduced Jon and me by email. With Jon's first paragraph, I knew. A few weeks later on our first date, I knew. And when he proposed two months later, I knew. Absolute as a mountain was this knowing.

Today is the anniversary of that lightning bolt of mutual intention striking. I have a year's worth of experience confirming what my being somehow measured on some indescribable cosmic scale almost at first glance: that this is my person to love. And I am his.

There is so much about knowing that will gratefully never be burdened by the limited reach of the mind.

Your New, Huge Size

That's what the subject line of the email said.

Having spent the past few days fielding well-meaning, unsolicited comments from strangers about my now-indisputable baby bump, I have this unnerving feeling of eternal exposure. As a writer, I am accustomed to a kind of security that comes from being the disembodied person behind the words. I like my privacy. And after several excruciatingly slow first-trimester months, suddenly my life is transforming in a hugely visible, public way at the momentum of an oncoming train. Never have I felt a greater sense of belonging to--or being claimed by--the human culture. The new life taking root in me seems to inspire a kind of magnetic optimism that is beaming in from the faces around me, everywhere I go. 

So when I saw "Your New, Huge Size" in my in-box, my first thought was that yet another stranger had somehow penetrated my personal space membrane to say something about my belly or how I should eat or feel or think or look or give birth. And my second thought amusingly brought me back to the reality of spamland; this was just another email about penis enhancement. And yet--

My new, huge size...I have been reinvented, larger than life. Or at least larger than my old life that is in the process of being shed from the inside out. This husk of past fattening around the seed of future. This little boy I know more intimately than anything or anyone and yet do not know. This answer to the question I never knew how to ask swallowed whole and blossoming.

Across the finish line

Well, folks, I did it. The first draft of Writing the Life Poetic is now in the capable hands of my fabulous editor, Jane Friedman. With nine months of writing nights and weekends under the belt, I have been floating around my office weightless and aimless, like a balloon cut free. Good thing I have five months of baby above the belt to give me a bit 'o ballast.

It's time to turn my activity level down a few notches, and I've been studying the masters of stillness: my animals. This one's my favorite so far. (Photo by Jon.) I call this the "seducing sleep" asana.

If you have any tips for saying "no" to inspiring and utterly important literary projects in favor of sleep and sanity, I'm all ears!

May 21: Emily Kendal Frey, Christopher Luna and Toni Partington read at B&N

On May 21, Barnes & Noble Reading Series is delighted to present three oh-so-fabulous poets: Emily Kendal Frey, Christopher Luna and Toni Partington.

When: Wednesday, May 21, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

Hosted by: Sage Cohen

Emily Kendal Frey recently relocated to Portland after many years in Boston. She has work forthcoming in Word For/Word, Spinning Jenny, Knock and Octopus. She is also at work on collaborative projects with the poets Sarah Bartlett and Zachary Schomburg. Poems born of these collaborations are forthcoming from Bat City Review, horse less press, Portland Review (with Sarah Bartlett), Diode and Pilot (with Zachary Schomburg).

Christopher Luna is a poet and collage artist with an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He hosts a monthly open-mic poetry reading in Vancouver, WA. Luna’s poetry has appeared in The Lion Speaks: An Anthology for Hurricane Katrina, eye-rhyme, Exquisite Corpse, and the @tached document. Chapbooks include tributes and ruminations and On the Beam (with David Madgalene). Luna is the author of Literal Motion, featuring three interviews with filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and is editing the correspondence of Brakhage and Michael McClure.

Toni Partington is a writer who lives and works in Vancouver, WA. She has been a featured reader at the Vancouver Barnes and Noble Poetry Series, received an Honorable Mention in the Oregon State Poet’s Association 2007 Spring Awards, and won first place in the 2007 Washougal Library Poetry Contest in the adult category. Her work has been published in the NW Women's Journal and the 2007 anthology: Selected Poems of the River Poets' Society.

Introducing Mr. Peanut

Today I am celebrating the half-way mark of the greatest creative act I have ever passively accomplished: pregnancy. At exactly five months, I am no longer pushing that lifelong boulder of me, myself and I uphill. Instead, I find myself hobbling from the first trimester precipice downhill toward a completely awe-agape new concept of we that is literally reinventing my body, my family, my future.

We learned last week in our ultrasound that Aliya, like Dahlia, has a penis. Instead of the daughters we dreamed up in high school, Jayne and I will have sons born within months of each other. Her third, my first, but gosh darn it, we pulled it off: a semi-synchronicity of motherhood! More than twenty years beyond our first shared crushes and infatuations, an entirely new boy narrative is emerging.

In five months, I will be mother to a son, our little in-utero Mr. Peanut. My son. Never have two words conjured so much possibility, so great an anticipation, so vast an unknown. 

Thank you, Northwest Author Series

On Sunday, I spoke at the Northwest Author Series about the power of poetry to transform our lives, community and world. Christina Katz, hostess with the mostess, suggested the topic; I'm so glad she did! In preparation, I spent a few weeks contemplating, researching, writing and corresponding with my local poet friends about the alchemy of poetry in our lives.

David Hare says "The act of writing is the act of discovering what we believe." This has always been my experience, and writing my lecture was no exception. I think my happiest discovery-through-writing was this one: Poetry is the electrical current of desire––to understand, to give name to, and to share––that anchors us to our humanity and to each other.

This current of desire magnetized 22 beautiful people to the Wilsonville Library on a Sunday afternoon where we told stories, explored questions and followed the golden thread of inspiration that stitched through our time together. I came home overcome with gratitude that there are others where I live who care passionately about poetry and are willing to splash about in the great depths of its mysteries with me.

Thank you to Christina for yet another gracious invitation to go deeper into my knowing and come back with an offering to share with my community. Each time I rise to a Christina challenge, I stretch beyond my previous idea of what might be possible and get a little braver, stand a little taller, then smile all the way home.

PLUTO'S LOSS*

on hearing of efforts to declassify Pluto as a planet

By Paul Guest

Little star, how lost to us you are already
and more to become, so small

that we here, distant and large and not ice
only, would demote you

to bobbin status, unplanet, chink of light
in a sky of major and minor

fire. For all your long orbit, who here cares:
some nights I try my heart at it

but little happens. The trees hoard a music
in them that must be locusts

aching to mate, to make more,
even to die. Clouds scuff the scarred moon

until it’s easy to forget you —
to think of water clotted

with green, where once I read Neruda
and Ovid distracted not by light

skipping off the scalloped lake
but by the memory of lace and sheer and bra —

by whom I loved. In that moment,
and in this one, I could not be

more human, to the dead sky
making apologies heard by no one, by nothing.

* Thank you, Mari, for introducing me to this poem!

Where Besson Street and Chevron Don't Meet

As I was introducing my poem "Where Besson Street and Chevron Don't Meet on Friday night, it occurred to me that my missing "sense of direction" gene has for much of my life been both literal and figurative. When you don't know where you're going, it's quite difficult to know when you've arrived!

This poem was sparked by a specific instance where I tried (and failed) to give a man directions so he could come visit me. But as poems do, it expanded to represent the larger failures of intimate connection between people, despite their genuine desire  to make contact with each other.

This morning, Dylan discovered in his archives a video of me reading the poem. He filmed it in February 2007 at the Dragonfly Cafe reading that Tomas organized. At the time, Dylan and I were at a directional crossroads of our own. I offer this poem as a small salve for all of us who, despite what we might want and fight for, do not arrive at the destination we intended.

Thank you, Silverton Poetry Festival

On Friday, Jon and I drove through a subdued landscape of open fields and sprawling farms bathed in late afternoon light. In our often overwhelmingly consuming lives of medical school and writing-for-a-living, it was a rare and delicious treat to be traveling together in daylight on a weekday toward an evening of community and poetry.

We arrived at the open, gracious home of Kathleen and her laughing-eyed husband where we squinted into the blessed sun on the back deck and got to know our Silverton Poetry Festival host Steve, President of the Association Michael and his wife Carol. Within a few minutes, the two other featured readers, Penelope Scambly Schott and Karen Holmberg arrived and joined us.

I must sound like a broken record, but I am routinely astounded by how much I love my Oregon writing community. Prior to life in Portland, it was a rare occurrence to admire a poet's work and also enjoy their company. In Silverton, I was reminded of how very wealthy I am with the double-blessing of people + poetry that I want to be up close and personal with. Every single person on that porch and around that dinner table was a person I wanted to know better and listen to at length.

Silverton felt like a glove I'd never realized I'd lost. It fit just right. I felt held and safe and warm. I had an impulse to wander barefoot down its streets in my nightgown, drinking a lemonade. The reading was held in a beautiful, intimate church with light and spring air pouring in from all directions. Beside the podium, a painting of a red chair piled with books and pens painted especially to commemorate this year's festival.

The first time I ever read my poetry publicly, I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it out alive. My breathing was so constricted and my hands so shaky that I wasn't even able to raise a bottle of water to my lips and take it in. I remember nothing about that reading other than that I was clearly still living at the end, for which I was grateful.

In contrast, fifteen or so years later, stepping up to the podium in Silverton was the first time I ever had the feeling of actually belonging up there in front of an audience. I had poems that I am proud of to share, and I was so thrilled and grateful to share them. I trusted myself to do a good job, and I trusted my audience to take the ride with me. My voice felt strong and sure. I was feeling the poems deeply as they came through me in spoken words.

A few poems before finishing, as I was reading I Make You a River, a man's cell phone rang. I smiled and paused as he fumbled for his phone, giving him time to silence it. I know the humiliation of forgetting to turn my phone off very well. No biggie. But when the man took the call and started talking I really didn't know where that left me. Should I try to talk over him? I giggled, then giggled some more, and kept on reading as the man shuffled out on his single crutch, still talking. In all my years of attending poetry readings, I've never seen such a thing! I have no idea what the protocol for such an interruption might be, but I sure did enjoy improvising.

Listening to Karen and Penelope was like breathing in a feast of wine and fruit and cheese. I hung on every word as worlds of image and sound and profound human truths rose up before me and carried me out into my own knowing. I don't know if I've ever been so present or connected as a listener at a reading.

Afterwards, Ella-Marie introduced herself and nearly knocked me over with the gale force of her enthusiasm. "That line about the poem being the hinge," she said. "That's it! That's how poetry is! That's exactly how it is!" This is the gift of poetry: Ella-Marie taught me something about my own poem and poetry at large by sharing what resonated for her. Thank you, Ella-Marie and everyone who has ever taken the time to receive my words and feed them back to me. Your listening creates a mystical expansion beyond where I can travel alone.

Thank you to Brittany, who introduced me to the Silverton Poetry Association (and who has captivated audiences there for the past two years) and thank you Michael, Steve and everyone who worked so hard to create such a fine poetry festival and a very special evening. And thank you to Jon for traveling far with great enthusiasm to share this evening with me. And for interrupting my many-decade cycle of participating in the events that matter most alone. Bathed in grace I am. With gratitude, always.