Today’s list comes from Tomi Wiley, current president of the Tennessee Writers Alliance and editor and publisher of TWA’s quarterly newsletter.  Tomi is also a newspaper editor and journalist, writing for two newspapers: Wilson Living magazine and www.countrymusicpride.com.  And I’m excited to say Tomi is expanding one of her published short stories into a novel to be published by Canonbridge in mid-2011.

If you think that makes Tomi sounds busy enough, well there’s more. She is also a freelance editor and writing coach, and writes the blog Media, Motherhood & Mayhem, which you’ll find at http://twiley3ms.blogspot.com.

Tomi is a single mother of a brilliant four-year-old boy who is learning to read, which means she can no longer S-P-E-L-L what she doesn’t want him to know about.

When does this woman find time to read? I don’t know. But she does. Tomi is a force of nature. And here’s her beautifully eclectic list of ten recommended reads:

 On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

On Writing by Stephen King

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Packing Light by Marilyn Kallet

As a former TWA board member and a presenter at this year’s TWA WordFest at Cumberland University in Lebanon, TN on June 19^th, I’m including a message from Tomi about WordFest with info about how you can participate.

I don’t know about you, but I am super excited about WordFest ’10, which is coming up June 19 – in just a few weeks! If you haven’t sent in your registration yet you have until June 1 to get the early discount. For your convenience, the registration for is on the TWA website at www.tn-writers.org. Visit this site for the downloadable form and more information.

Pleaes note the reception has been relocated to the Cumberland campus, which will be convenient and lovely. We look forward to some great workshops and networking opportunities, so send in your form soon and tell your friends! If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to email me.

Also, the deadline for submissions to the summer 2010 edition of The Tennessee Writer is July 1. Please email me with your article ideas or suggestions, and if you’d like to review a book please let me know. Feel free to send in photos (as high res JPEG attachments) of your corner of Tennessee or something pertaining to your writing. Again, feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions.

Write on!

If anyone would like to contact Tomi about her writing, editing, TWA, The Tennessee Writer, or WordFest ‘10, Tomi’s email address is TnWriterEditor@gmail.com.

Lastly, it’s Memoiral Day Weekend. I hope you have a great one. While you are busy at a cookout, or swimming at the lake, or taking a trip on this long weekend to visit family or see the some natural wonder, remember that this holiday was instituted to honor our veterans.  Please give these brave men and women a though and thanks in the midst of this busy weekend.

Change is always a shock at first. But change almost always brings opportunity. When we recognize that sizzle and spark of new energy, amazing things can happen.

Some of you know I’ve been on the Duke Writers Workshop faculty since the early 90s. I loved that workshop, it’s spirit, and the gifted teachers, students, and staff with whom I’ve had the good fortune to work. This year Duke University Contintuing Studies Program has decided to focus on professional certificate programs and cut it’s creative writing program. So there will not be a Duke Writers Workshop this fall.  BUT NEVER FEAR! Our leader, long-time director Georgann Eubanks, has rallied and we are reinventing this workshop as TABLE ROCK WRITERS WORKSHOP, named for the striking geographical feature visible from Wildacres, the workshop’s retreat center home perched at the top of a mountain in the North Carolina highlands near Little Switzerland.

We’ll have the same great leadership, the same dynamic faculty, and lots of new energy sizzling around our new name and our rededication to making this workshop an outstanding week-long event that includes both nurture and challange for its participants. For more on this workshop, please read Georgann’s blog post at: http://tablerockwriters.wordpress.com/

That’s just one product of this new energy. We now have a blog!

Assignment: Look around for learning opportunities in the area of creative writing. Every writer needs to invest in his or her craft. Workshops are a great way for unpublished and published writers alike to push themselves to new levels of work. Do your reseaerch and come up with three writers workshops, festivals, or writing events that you’d like to participate in over the next two years. Then, make it happen.

I’m busy at work today cleaning and sorting and trying not to lose any ground with my anti-clutter campaign, which I began at the first of the year.  I’ve just gone through the house dusting and tossing and putting things in their proper place. I’m referring here to areas I’ve already purged several times. I still have not cleaned off the top of the refrigerator or the upright freezer. I’m short. The tops of those appliances don’t bother me–if I don’t think about them or don’t need something that’s artfully stacked on top of them.  After writing this post I’ll enter into the Twilght Zone, a.k.a my office, and see what’s hiding in there.

Sorting and purging can uncover things you love that you’ve forgotten about—out of sight, out of mind. The act of sorting and purging can also inspire. Ideas may begin to germinate as you find notes and articles you’ve forgotten about, books covered with dust. Maybe you made notes on a good idea and they are buried in the hurry and rush of everyday living and stacking, or maybe notes were tucked into the pages of a book you were reading at the time. Sometimes our best future emerges out of our rediscovered past. Continue Reading »

Today’s Five and Ten list comes from one of my favorite poets and a great friend, Michael Chitwood. Raised in Patrick County, Virginia, we hail from close the same stomping grounds, and met when we both lived in Chapel Hill, NC, where he and his family still reside. Chitwood received his BA from Emory and Henry and an MFA from University of Virginia, and claims George Wright as a major influence.

When I read Chitwood’s poetry, I hear the familiar sound, the intelligence, and the music of rural Virginia. Like novelist Larry Brown, Chitwood doesn’t not trade on stereotypes, but writes with respect about the lives of the working class. More recently his work has been more personal, as in my favorite of his collections, From Whence (LSU, 2007). His other collections include: Salt Works (1992), Whet (1995), The Weave Room (1998), Gospel Road Going (2002), and Spill (2007). He also has written two collections of essays: Hitting Below the Bible Belt (1998) and Finishing Touches (2006) Continue Reading »

As an award-winning poet, I never feel I know enough about poetry. I’m always trying to learn more, get a better purchase, push myself to new territory, try forms I’ve never tried before, or return to poetic forms to try again when success in that form has eluded me. I turn to other poets for their insights on poetry as well as the excellent modeling in their poems. Here are just three poets (in alphabetical order) whose commentary on poetry has directed my learning, spurred my deeper engagement with this genre, and urged me to consider poetry’s place in my work and in contemporary culture. Continue Reading »

My song writer crush, Marshall Chapman, wrote an essay called “Crush.” I think that’s the title, and I’d link to it, but I can’t find it. In it, though, she writes about how we walk around having crushes on people and things all the time. These crushes are about chemistry, affinity, cellular recognition; these crushes don’t have to be sexual. Of course I don’t want to rule that element out, since I have about 30 kinds of crushes on my husband.

As for a poetry crush, you never know when or where a poetry crush will strike. So keep your eyes and ears open; be ready at all times. Maybe you suddenly have a crush on a street corner, say 5th and Charlotte in Nashville, for instance, and it becomes a poem. Maybe you spot a thin volume on the bookstore shelf and your hand is drawn to it, as if by magic spell. Sometimes you just hear someone read a poem they’ve written, and wham. It can happen with fiction too, any kind of writing really. But poetry is so compressed, so intense, that a poetry crush just slaps you upside the head. Continue Reading »

Some readers and writers are intimidated by poetry or think they don’t like poetry because of the poems they were made to read in school. Metrical poetry can also be intimidating because of the time we spent in high school English class scanning the poems in our literature text books. While I love to read Shelley and Yeats and Blake and Dickenson and TS Elliot, I would hate to think my impression of poetry was limited to that experience.

My collection of poems, for instance, is in some ways a collection of teeny tiny stories. Yet many of those poems have a formal structure: sestina, pantoum, cinquain, tanka-senru-haiku combinations, and so on. I wanted to portray spoken language of a place and still use form. For me, in that book, if my form shows in the reading of a poem, it is like my slip is showing. Continue Reading »

For several days I have been listening to and singing theKyrieas performed by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, arranged by Father Guido Haazen. You may remember it from the end of the movie The Singing Nunstaring Sally Field. I’ve posted it on Facebook and Twitter. Kyrie eleison, a pre-Christian plea, is part of the Catholic Mass. Continue Reading »

I’m ushering in National Poetry Month by sharing a list sent to me by my good friend and the former North Carolina Poet Laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer.  Kay grew up in North Georgia. She received her MFA from University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For years she’s lived in Cullowhee, NC. Her books include: Catching Light (LSU Press, 2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series.

 Kay’s other claim to fame is that she’s my husband’s favorite poet. Now let’s think about that a minute, shall we.

When I asked Kay if she wanted to say anything about National Poetry Month, since I was osting her list at the beginning of April, her response went like this: “Poetry shouldn’t be enjoyed for only one lousy month, even if it is April, the cruelist month–why poets like T.S. Eliot like it, I reckon. Every month should be poetry month.”  Continue Reading »