Strange and Wild

I read a craft tip recently from the poet Maggie Smith (author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Tupelo Press 2015, among other works) that really resonated with me:

Sometimes the best thing I can do to improve a poem is to loosen my grip on it. It sounds a bit counterintuitive, but if you tie up every loose end, if you scrub all the strangeness and wildness out of it, you can revise the life right out of a poem if you’re not careful. You can put its light out.

(more of Maggie Smith’s wise words here on Diane Locward’s Poetry Newsletter)

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Two Fall Updates

FallTwinTreesWe started with the little things: scraps of junk, things of no import or stuff we could do without. But soon we had to burn the things we needed, the things we loved. By the end, we let go of just about everything around us we held dear. We tossed it into the flames and watched it smolder.

So begins my story on the Siege of Sarajevo, out in the fall issue of Carve Magazine here, along with the award-winning stories from the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Continue reading