Christmas Cookies

Christmas Cookies

This baking is taking

the fruit of some body

and mixing it with the fruit

of the earth, birthing

harmony in each small cookie,

Mary’s sowing, reaping, crushing, sifting,

the cow with milk to give, hen with eggs to fold in,

substance of life and life-giving blending.

Isn’t this season about celebrating

the melding of spirit

with flesh? Remember

our miracles blossom from trauma

and this baking is beating

ingredients, dividing

dough in heaping spoonfuls,

elements indivisible – egg and sugar,

wheat and water.

Bite in, lick the crumb from your upper lip…

Partake in this communion of saints

while the miracle still warms the wafer.

And now we are all here: laborer,

consumer, life-giver, hovering over a tray

of peace on Earth.


I'm not sold on the ending. I'm not sold on the whole poem, even, but I needed to write about this. I was baking cookies and thinking about baking cookies, so a poem needed to be born. Hope you enjoy your cookies this holiday.

The Holidays

It is the season of Christmas music, Christmas lights, Christmas cookies, Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, and Christmas. Christmas. Just the word lifts my spirits. Merry Christmas to you. And you. And you over there, too!

I'd like to give a shout out to the folks over at Kodak Gallery. I ordered *stuff* from them on Saturday, and UPS says it is on its way to my house today - Wednesday - just four days after I ordered it. That's amazing! Santa Claus and his elves don't have nuthin' on these people. My order wasn't just pictures, either. I won't tell you everything I ordered, but I did order a 40 page bound photo book of my family. If I had gone the old-fashioned route and scrapbooked this baby, it would've taken me at least a year, but Captain Kodak Efficiency is delivering it, bound and glossy, to my doorstep in just four days. Wow. So, if you are looking to create a unique and attractive Christmas gift this holiday season for some well-deserving grandparents or aunts, check it out.

BW and I battled back and forth for a few weeks about Christmas shopping this year (to spend or not to spend - that is always the question), but finally settled on a maximum dollar figure for the year. We're on a mission to become debt-free - a mission that will take at least several years, just for plastic debt - so any outside spending feels like we're slowing down the payoff. But it is Christmas! Spread good cheer! Be generous even with little! Some of you will smirk at our budgeted funds - $200 - but you'd be surprised how far we stretched that money. By the way, we finished our shopping. Insert triumphant laugh.

With the holiday break only seven work days away, I've taken out a stack of books by almost all of the poets who will be attending the Key West Literary Seminar and hope to read something by all of them before I go in January. It's a hefty stack.

I just finished reading two excellent books, very different in subject matter - Still Alice by Lisa Genova and The Host by Stephanie Meyer. Still Alice was a heartbreaking story about a woman (Alice) who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. The book is written from a third-person limited omniscient point-of-view from Alice's perspective and follows Alice from her thriving career as a Harvard professor through the stages of degeneration. The author does a magnificent job of bringing the reader into each scene. Alice's relationships with her husband and children change and evolve throughout the book in a very real and powerful way. The author writes with truth and compassion about her characters. It is a beautiful story.

The Host by Stephanie Meyer is almost impossible to summarize without sounding wacky. Like the Twilight series, The Host is a sci-fi book that incorporates many themes I care about - love, sacrifice, reconciliation, forgiveness - into a strange and futuristic world. It seems evident to me that the author is modeling her main character after Jesus, incorporating powerful parallels. "He came into the world, but the world rejected him," could be an opening epigram for this book. While this book did not capture my attention as intensely as the Twilight series, I found myself much more engaged and not hating the main character or feeling annoyed by any one perspective. This is a much more well-rounded book with very few lag moments.

I have really enjoyed this dive back into fiction. I missed plot and character development, extended narratives, and dialogue. I missed not having to figure out what the story is really about, although I did do that anyway.

Poetry writing has come to a bit of a standstill for the time being. I have a few ideas but just haven't had the time to write. As usual, much of the drafting might have to be done in my brain before I ever sit down for the writing. I need to figure out what I want to take to Key West for workshopping. I want to bring mostly new material to see where I could go from here. I'm excited for Key West. It is hard to think about it now in the face of this great season (see beginning of this post).

It seems we have come full circle! Time to sign off - have a blessed holiday if I don't sign back on in a while!

What Is This Really About?

Over the course of the last six months (!), I've been working on shaping my collection of poems. It has gone through a number of transformations and two title changes, and right now I have six stacks of paper in the kitchen - one stack for each "theme" I think my book has. (Six. Hm. Maybe this is where I need to start - too many themes?)

I do believe that there is a thread running through all of these poems... perhaps several. The trouble is finding the thread and discovering how all of the poems are connected to it. So as an exercise tonight, I've decided to try to explain what I hope my poetry collection as a whole accomplishes, what all of the poems add up to. Wish me luck.

I have titled my manuscript, "Pruning Burning Bushes." The poem titled this is the first poem I had selected for publication, by my good friends over at Relief. The poem is based off of the passage in John 15 that talks about bearing good fruit and being pruned. Pruning removes the dead and broken branches so that new and healthy growth can be formed. The pruning in this poem is rather extreme - the shrubs are cut back very far, and then the gardener stands back and waits to see where the calluses will form -- calluses on trees are the scars left once a branch has healed over the cut.

The other side to this is that I am pruning "burning bushes" - an obvious glance back at the Old Testament appearance of God in the burning bush. So what does it mean to prune a burning bush? I'm not sure - that's why I'm writing this. Here's some ideas for what I think this could mean. First, Moses was a classical whiner. He tried his very best to get out of the mission to save the Jews from bondage. He kept trying to defer responsibility and calling on to other people. He was talking to a bush that was burning but not being consumed! I mean, come on, talk about guts and cowardice crashing against one another simultaneously. You would think Moses would have been terrified to disagree with God given his self-doubt, but he questions the God of the universe's plan at least three times. Silly, silly Moses.

So maybe pruning the burning bush is our attempt to cut back the calling, slim it down to something more manageable and less miraculous.

That's one idea.

But I don't think that's what this is about. I think this is more oriented around the idea for the poem in the first place, the idea that we ourselves are being pruned and shaped, not only so that we can bear more fruit but also so that God's calling, plan and purpose can be evident in our lives. Perhaps we ought to embody the burning bush, so to speak. We are supposed to "let our lights shine," aren't we? What light is that? Why, the light of the Holy Spirit! *bells and whistles*

This really does relate to my book because in general, the poems are all either personal or thematically applicable to this pruning and shaping idea. The shape that feels natural for this is almost chronological - it feels as if the book should move from the innocence and delight of childhood into the heavy pruning, to healing, to rejoicing, to teaching. Maybe that's it.

Right now, the "arch" of the book is close to this. I have family/cycle of life poems in the first section, darker struggling poems in the second, rejoicing/marriage poems in the third, and seeds/planting poems in the fourth. It kind of follows the movements I'm hoping to accomplish. Kind of. I'd like to think more about where the "circle of life" poems belong. Do they belong in the first section with the other poems of place and family? hm.

The best and most frustrating part about this is that lots of people don't care. Poets and non-poets alike are completely uninterested in whether the book hangs together as an aesthetic whole. Are the poems good? Do they have the same voice? That's enough. For some. I can't decide if I'm one of those people. I want the poems to make sense together - there are poems I've written that are not in the same voice and simply don't belong in this book - but I also want variation and modulation (as the boss would say). Should the book move somewhere? Does the reader end up somewhere other than where they began? Hmmmm.

I think I'll go and fiddle with the order some more now that I've unloaded all of those blatherings.

That Crazy Thang Called "Plans"

It's the end of another week, and I have a bit of a headache that I'm calling sinus because if I scrunch up my nose and squint my eyes, the pressure seems to be relieved a little bit. It's kind of hard to type like this and I think all of the undergraduates wandering by my door think I'm crazy, but at least there's some relief!

I failed to report on Warren-Wilson. I don't really remember whether I mentioned on here that I applied to this elite low-res MFA program, but I did. It was the only school I applied to, figuring that since I'm not in any major rush to start working on a degree I might as well only apply to the #1 place I'd like to be. So I applied, and the WW website said that I'd hear somewhere between three and six weeks after their application deadline. Once that time period rolled around, I started to experience this serious anxiety about being accepted. With Brandon starting school and the two of us being on this kick to eliminate debt, financing a second graduate degree at this point would be rather cost-prohibitive. And the program doesn't offer any tuition reduction or scholarships. But I applied anyway, and here I am chewing my lip through trying to decide what to do if I'm accepted.

Imagine my surprise when I was absolutely relieved to be rejected! Ahhh, thank you, door of opportunity slammed shut! There's nothing quite like receiving a strong NO when you have anxiety about a situation.

I have to pull a quick quote from back in March that I stumbled upon this afternoon. It made me giggle and sigh at my own stupidity.

In many ways I don't know what to do next, in regards to poetry. I am working on a draft of my first full-length manuscript right now, getting feedback from poet friends on order and arc and what-not, but what I don't know is whether I should be thinking about going for my graduate degree, either MFA or something else, or whether I am right where I need to be. Another thing my friend said on Thursday that really struck a chord with me is that often, once we've found our niche and begin to succeed, we have a tendency to be rewarded or promoted straight out of that place that God put us - the sweet spot where we are most productive. Even though some pursuits may seem like good ideas, they might not be God's idea, or God's timing. This is something I've been thinking a lot about with my career as a poet (if you can call being a poet any sort of "career"). Is going for a higher degree right now or in the near future a good idea, God's idea, both, or neither?

When I think about it in terms of my family, I think going back to school right now would be putting myself before every other member in my family. It would be a seriously selfish move - especially since Brandon has been planning to go back to school for a few years now. I don't think it is right or fair to him or my children to take on yet another project, especially when I am already over-committed with work, church, and my poetry as it is. I think in a few years, once the kids are in school and the husband is almost done or finished with his master's, the timing will be better. And who knows where we will be a few more years down the road? I certainly never predicted we'd be here.

So how about that? Why didn't I stick to my guns, you ask? Because I am like every other human being on this planet - ambitious, big-headed, and over-eager - and don't like to pay attention to any still, small voices of reason. That's why. Have you ever been excited about rejection like this? I was thrilled! I still am thrilled! I don't have to make any difficult decisions!

In other exciting news, guess who's going to Key West in January? Oh yeah, baby, that's me, hangin' with my poet homies... you know, all those people who won't know me but I sure know them! At least through their writing... Richard Wilbur, Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Billy Collins and a whole host of other poets. It's going to be so fabulous.

I've also had some publication news come streaming in lately. In the last month or so, I've had three poems accepted - Christianity & Literature, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, and just today, Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature. It's been an exciting month! It just goes to show that even if you've received 120 rejections in the last year, acceptance might just be right around the corner. The publications are such an affirmation, but as I mentioned in my last post, this is not why I write. In fact, if that becomes why I'm writing, I think all inspiration and authenticity about my work will go flying away. I can't write for publication. Then it is not true. Sometimes I feel myself leaning in that direction, thinking, "I bet what they'd like to read is something more like this..." and then I start to put the pen to the paper and panic because there's nothing there. No inspiration whatsoever.

Be true to your voice. Be true to your subject matter. And never think, "Oh, they won't like that subject/topic/form/word/theme/punctuation mark." They shouldn't be a thought in your mind until far beyond the first draft and multiple revisions of the poem. But it's easy to lose that focus.

I'm excited about a few poem ideas I have floating around in my brain right now. All I need to do is find the time to write. It sounds so simple...

Happy weekend!

Posting Poems

You may be asking yourself, (or probably not), "Why hasn't Sarah been posting poems lately?" And the truth of the matter is I haven't written any lately - it's been a busy late summer and fall, and with all this life happening, writing isn't. But also, I have been thinking about this blog and the posting of poems, and I'm a little unsure how to proceed with the posting of poems.

You see, there are many respected journals that say things like, "No previously published work, anywhere, at all, online or off-line." But they never say, "especially blogs" or "in particular, blogging and social networking sites," which leaves me wondering whether a blog is considered a form of publication. It is certainly a form of distribution, and rarely do I post a finished product. Usually it is a fresh idea, first draft sort of poem. My revision process is always done privately and then sent out to journals and people I know will give me good feedback on stuff.

I've talked about this here before - the underlying issue is not whether so-and-so will publish this poem because it previously appeared somewhere else, the issue is, who am I writing these things for? What is the point? Am I seeking only public acknowledgement for whatever truths or stories I've discovered through the writing, or am I looking to share the fiddlings and meditations I've put into verse with those I love and the other people who happen to stumble upon this blog? And is there something to preserving poetics until it is in its final form to be revealed later?

Another poet I admired during the poem-a-day project did something of a compromise: she would post her poem today and then tomorrow, when she was ready to post a new one, she'd go back to that previous post, delete the previous poem, and put *Poof!* in the poem's place. I've done this with some of the poems that have been accepted for publication places, because for one thing the originals on here are but wintry shadows compared to the revised versions, and also because the journal has a right that I've granted to be the first place or only place to publish that particular poem. I like this idea and I think it gets me out of the "previously published elsewhere" issue - it'll only appear for 24 hours and then bye-bye, poem online!

What do you think? Poets out there, do you think there are issues with publishing poems on the internet, specifically blogs, before sending them out to journals? Are there any experts out there who know the "rules"? And should I care about these rules? Do you care? ;)

Pushing Matchbox Cars

"Sow your seed in the morning, and at night let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well." - Ecclesiastes 11:6

That's really all I want to say. I've tried to elaborate on this verse for the last fifteen minutes and keep coming up with hogwash. Everything I type sounds like a lecture I've been giving myself, about the energy I've drained at work and the ghost of a person I become at home in the evenings. As a colleague of mine said today, why should people at work get the best of me and the people I love get the rest of me? Well, he said it more eloquently than that. And his didn't rhyme.

The fact is that all of our activities deserve 100% of us, and that seems impossible. Work deserves that much, husband, kids, family, friends... but usually we devote 90% of ourselves to one task, and the remaining people and tasks get whatever is left, that slouched over, heavy-eyed, mumbling self looking for a quiet corner to avoid the rest of society.

Is there a way to balance? To pull your eyes off the computer at home and let them rest on the man you married or the kids you made? Everything in moderation? Yes. In fact, that good teacher from Ecclesiastes has an even more well-known little ditty that goes a little somethin' like this: "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die..." and so on. You know it. You are probably singing the song right now. Later on, Solomon has another refrain, "I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live." That's all. Live.

What that means is it is okay to let go. There's a time and a place for everything, and that does not mean that the time for everything is right now. Sow your seeds in the morning -- that's when we do our work -- and at night, let not your hands be idle -- that's when we play. What if the souls you are investing in after work are the very same souls God wants to use to reach a hurting world? Don't they deserve your attention, too, attention of a different kind? Here's where the self-lecture comes in that I mentioned earlier.

Mostly I want to say that there is purpose in every minute of the day. There's always something we could be investing in - our relationships, our work, our prayer life, ourselves even. I do not know what is going to succeed - whether my work at work or my work at home, and maybe the most important task I do today will be pushing Matchbox cars around the living room floor, because that will be a moment my son remembers forever, a small expression of love that embedded itself in his mind. Maybe something else will be more dramatic and important. Ya just don't know.

So, sow your seeds in the morning, and at night don't let your hands be idle. You don't know which is going to succeed, whether this or that, or whether they'll both turn out awesome. You can only invest in it all. Live fully your life. "Purpose yourself to have a good day." ;) And since you can't do it all on your own, pray pray pray. Let God be the God of endurance, perseverance, and hope.

And stop griping all the time. It's not that bad. Really. And it isn't about you, anyway, so grow up. (Mini-self-lecture.)

Painting Nails and Gettin' Dolled Up for Work?!

In about three hours, the students and faculty will begin to arrive for the Ashland MFA program, and step one to prepare for the residency today: painting my nails. This is clearly the most important item on my agenda for the day, even though I rarely paint my nails, even for weddings. I even brought out the pedicure-pull-your-toes-apart things, AND used top coat. I didn't use base coat, sorry Rhonda ;) But Lydia would be proud - the color is a bit like a tangerine.

Don't be fooled by all of this girliness. The kit I own was given to me by my grandparents when I was in high school. The nail polish I used? Yup. From high school. Same kit. It might have even been in middle school, I don't remember now. Boy that was a long time ago. My nail polish is almost half my age. I wonder if good nail polish is like a fine wine ... does it improve with age?

I am thoroughly excited about the residency, which probably accounts for the nail polish. Why I didn't wait until after I showered, after cleaning the house, is a great question that we'll leave to the experts at Elle Magazine.

The family is on their way to Akron for the next two weeks, with the occasional trip back to Ashland for gym and swim class and a wedding. I will miss them, but selfishly, I'm relieved that they have somewhere to go for the two weeks. The residency is dawn-til-dusk and then later, even, and only seeing them for a few minutes here and there throughout the day would be difficult for everyone. I am grateful that our extended family live nearby so Brandon has some help.

Today begins two weeks of talking to people who all get me. Not that you all don't get me, too, but these folks are all crazy-passionate about writing, and it is SO fun. Exhausting, but fun.

So now that my nails are dry (and slightly dented from typing....), I am going to go prep for the day. Have a great one!