I'll Get You, My Pretty

 My flash-fiction piece “What I Do When I Can’t Sleep” just came out in the fall 2013 issue of Cloudbank, a print journal. It’s the story of a witch who wears a green satin dress and carries a torch for an astronaut. The dress was real, a gift to me from my dad’s Aunt Jimmie, a small, gravelly-voiced lady who wore red lipstick on her creased lips and offered us chocolates, probably Van Duyn’s or Whitman’s. When I was about eight, I dug Aunt Jimmie’s green satin dress out of my dress-up box and wore it for Halloween as part of my witch costume. Some people think an interest in clothes is frivolous, but that dress, with its gleam, had power. Just thinking about it now, makes me feel like I could fly….

The Secret Lives of Artists

I’ll let you in on a secret – writers aren’t all the hair-pulling, angst-ridden artists portrayed in books and movies.

They’re people who like to tell a funny story  or craft a clever line.  People who want to explore the paths of their own imagination or revisit the events – both big and small – that make up their own lives.  People who have something they’ve been wanting to say and people who simply like to make things, to play.  In other words, writers are people just like you.

Cinderella's Famous Ride

My poem "The Ride" is in the summer issue of VoiceCatcher.  I wrote this poem when our children were small.  We all had a thing for the story of Cinderella, and so we acted out different versions of it every night.  Our son was a prince with a paper crown and my husband got a kick out of playing the wicked stepmother...but that's another story. Here's a link to the journal - www.voicecatcherjournal.org.