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Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic (Chapter 43)
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It alternates between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. Susan led last week’s discussion, which included a really cool Mad Lib exercise. This week, we’ll be talking about Chapter 43: I’m So Adjective, I Verb Nouns: On Word Choice. I get into
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic (Chapter 29)
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It alternates between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. Susan hosted about Small Stones in this week’s post, and here we’re talking this week about Chapter 29: Making Music: Rhyme, Rhythm, and Repetition. Song lyrics are some of my favorite poems,
Risking Failure Is Fun. Failure Stinks.
This year, I’ve been really stretching out of my comfort zone in both my writing and in my free time. (Here’s how my color guard adventure started out…) Recently, I’ve taken a couple of hard knocks in both arenas. In writing, I’ve needed to branch out beyond my usual age range/form to try to earn
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic (Chapter 27)
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It alternates between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. Last week, we worked on line breaks at Susan’s blog. And the week before, we worked on sound diagrams right here, and I’ve been putting that tactic to work
Acting Out “After the Storm”: Teacher Tips
Friday, I posted my poem “After the Storm” from PoetryTagTime, the fun, inexpensive (99 cents!), teacher-friendly e‑anthology of the 30 poems from Sylvia Vardell’s Poetry Tag feature for National Poetry Month. Yesterday, at the PoetryTagTime Tips blog, Sylvia posted some great teaching tips for teachers to use with my acrostic poem, including a Poetry Performance idea. I love this! When
Poetry Friday: After the Storm (by me)
Roger Sutton recently posted about Poetry Tag Time, the e‑anthology brilliantly created by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong to try to make poetry more accessible and get it into more classrooms. 30 fun and fantastic kids’ poems for only 99 cents! So I thought I’d share my poem from it here and encourage you all to
Protective Gear for Writers
Last week was our first Minnesota Brass color guard practice since auditions. I got to video the new portion of the audition routine, and this week I’m trying to learn it before practice again. So off and on, I’ve been out in the backyard (which has alternated between too snowy, too swampy, and too dog poopy) working on it.
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic (Chapter 24)
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It alternates between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. Last week, Susan hosted a discussion about Chapter 11 amid all the dang LiveJournal outages. This week, we’re talking about Chapter 24: Sound: Writing Out Loud right here. I hope it’s OK to
Audition Results–I Made It!
I got word on Friday–I made it! If you’ve been following my Minnesota Brass adventure, you know I had official auditions for the color guard 2–1/2 weeks ago. Thank you to all of you who have been encouraging me over the past few months as I’ve struggled with this new activity. You’ve made me feel
Write After Reading: Writing the Life Poetic (Chapter 9)
Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It alternates between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog. Last week, we chatted about Chapter 7 at Susan’s blog, so feel free to head over there to see what you missed. Today we’re right here, talking about Chapter 9. Living the Life Poetic.
Auditions
Minnesota Brass auditions were Wednesday night. You know how on So You Think You Can Dance, there are always dancers that do really well with their routine they’ve been perfecting for ages? And then Nigel and Mia and Adam send them on to choreography to see how well they can pick up new stuff? And you
Auditions Tonight–Ack!
I’ve been sharing my Minnesota Brass adventure with you, and here’s a quick update. Last Wednesday night, I went to rehearsal and practiced for 2–1/2 hours. Then I got up at 2:30 a.m. Thursday to head to New York City for a week with my husband. For the past week, I have ridden subways and eaten cheesecake and cannolis. We walked a lot,
Write After Reading: Writing the Life Poetic (Chapters 1 and 3)
It’s here! Write After Reading: Living the Life Poetic is a weekly online book club with poetry participation. It will alternate between my blog and Susan Taylor Brown’s blog . Now. I’m just hoping we haven’t built this up TOO much. I’d hate for you to have overly high expectations, because I’m seeing this as a fun, casual conversation. Some of
Leave It Behind to Improve It?
I already knew that perfectionism had no place in my Minnesota Brass adventure. As a first-time spinner, I have no hope nor expection of perfection, and I’m not a perfectionist, anyway, in any areas of my life. I’m a pretty-darn-goodist at best. But, when I know I need to improve in something, I will practice it fairly
Putting It Out There
As the next step in sharing my Minnesota Brass adventure, I promised to get a bit of video so that you can see what I’m working on if you’ve never seen a color guard before. Also, I’m tired of text, text, text. So one day as the temp hovered around 6 degrees, I took my phone during my driveway
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Are You Looking For?
Go to my Poetry page for:
- National Poetry Month projects through the years
- Small Reads Roundups (poems grouped by topic)
- Introductions to several favorite poetry forms