Needless to say, I’ve long since blown right past the 4000 blog entries entries mark where I began the year. It’s now closer to 4500 entries. Because of revisiting and recording old journal entries, and using Facebook Memories, I’ve managed to garner dozens of posts lifted from Facebook comments that I had not posted before in this blog. It’s interesting to realize many FB comments are often the nascent beginnings of a poem.
For example last year, in mid-December, 2021, for example, I only had 125 posts, and then, because of Facebook Memories, I was able to add more posts. Call it found art. For 2021, I eventually tallied 170 posts—that’s nearly 50 more posts. I thought I was not going to break the 125 posts mark either for 2022, but suddenly a rush of poems gave me 181 posts, with 90 poems and 28 prose poems written.
Now I will need to revise that figure because I went through my latest writing journal whwich I am about to retire, for lack of pages, with a fine tooth, comb, and pulled up 10 more prose poems and non-fiction, leaving me with a total of 190 posts for the year. Wowza. Considering I began this stats analysis post with 125 entries, I'm stoked.
Because I belong to several Zoom writing groups, it has generated a lot of new work. One group is weekly, Write On! facilitated by California Poets in the Schools, led by Terri Glass and Susie Terence. I also belong to the bi-monthly Mill Valley Library non-fiction writers’ group, I don’t always get poems or even decent prose from the prompts, but I still managed to garner more than my self-proscribed minimum output of 52 poems per year.
I also participated in several drop-in Zoom readings and workshops that lead to interesting prose pieces. One led by Patrice Vecchioni, and I gate-crashed a MFA Zoom literary event at Majarishi University, Iowa, that generated a lot of work. And in Calvin Algrin’s Marin County Poetry Center workshop, we workshopped new poems. So, out of the pandemic, I’ve cobbled together a cyber writing enrichment focus, something I was so desperate for during the early days of the pandemic. I wish I had done this much sooner.
I attended Zoom poetry readings at the 2nd Tuesday Modesto-Stanislaw Poetry Center, Columbia University, Telluride, and other Zoom workshop venues. I also coordinated the student reading at the Poetry Flash Watershed Poetry and Ecology Festival in Berkeley. It felt weird to be reading poems out in public again. There were also book party readings for a Sonoma County anthology at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and at Cafe Aqus for Petaluma Poetry Walk.
Against all odds, in less than a week, in June, though I was burned out from teaching, I managed to crank out a massive a two-year California Arts Council multi-artist in residency grant through Poetry Flash; we were awarded $57,000 for two years, so my CPITS poets will have matching money in Alameda County, we are continuing the John Oliver Simon Legacy. A school I’ve been teaching at for years.
At Malcolm X ES in Berkeley, with teacher Dr. Kathryn Mapps, we manage to also garner another $15,000 of funding. Yeah, I am not sure how much longer I will be teaching in the schools as I turned 70 in November. It was a quiet affair. But then we haven’t had any real holidays since Covid. Cousin has caught Covid twice, and I remain Covid-free through diligence, even though I am teaching.
Feeling the need to produce something more, I pulled a journal at random from my stack of poetry journals and began to work on the year 1988 which only had 77 posts, but I managed to get at least five solid journal entries including a few Napa pieces, and some teaching notes, which I had previously neglected, and I discovered the origins of at least three poems, so now 1988 has 112 posts, and several drafts of poems could be turned into poems. That's 35 new posts! But the chances of my going back into old writing to whip something into a new poem are next to nil. That ship has long since sailed.
I found the real first draft of SUMMER SQUASH IN A WINTER GARDEN, I had no idea I had written it as a prose piece that had nothing to do with John. Summer squash, prosepoem There’s basically nothing left in the journal to cull for the blog. But revisiting and mining the past is never easy. There are pitfalls. Once again, I tried to go into my South American journals, only to discover that my Ecuador journal is missing. Also I didn’t date a lot of the pieces, so it made it harder to figure out when pieces were written.
Publishing credits. THE GIFT OF THIS DAY, The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California, 2022. Readings at Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and Cafe Aqus for Petaluma Poetry Walk. Poems and photos published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, PDF/hard copy, Four Feathers Press monthly publication plus chapbook series, Don Kingfisher Campbell, Editor, 2022 (Spectrum): 13th WAVE, Storm, Buenaventura (photo), TECOPA HOT SPRINGS (photo), NATURAL SELECTION, SIMMER RITUAL And finally after nearly a three-year hiatus, WAR'S END (3 days after Hiroshima) was published in the anthology, War, Literature, & the Arts (Fall 2022 online), Dept. of English & Fine Arts, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado. And my Brownie Mary photos were published in Leaf Magazine..
Not that I even care, but the olde blog bean counter is at 876,237 visits since I put the counter app on my page. Google Search has become meaningless. I added old and new work (10 pieces) to my Maureen Hurley Art blog, now at 245 posts. And I showed two paintings at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center’s Spring Art show. I’ve stalled on my photo blog, Maureen Hurley B&W Photography©️1980 - 2000. I foresee a lot more scanning in my future. But I joined a new Facebook black-and-white photo group. Roger Bolt who creates the site, has featured some of my pieces.
And to keep things humble, or how I got myself into this Bloggity mess. When This Blog Really Began—Aug 2008 should prove enlightening. Or not.
No comments:
Post a Comment