New Poem in Constellation: Ekphrasis

One of my favorite things about living in Vermont is that we have a deep and vibrant literary community here. One of the steward of this community is Literary North, a local literary organization that hosts incredible events and organizes the best calendar of literary happenings in the area. They're a godsend and when they put out a call for works of ekphrasis, I was thrilled to send out "Landfill," a poem I wrote last fall. It was written in Atlanta and inspired by a work in the Hood Museum by an artist I first encountered in New York and the omnipresent global climate crisis. 

At a time when things feel tiny and localized, it was nice to pull this out and be reminded of how vast and interconnected we all are.

New Poem in The Decameron

It's been quite a long time since I checked in here! I've got loads of personal updates (since I last checked in about two years, I've started a new job, taken a class with the brilliant Vievee Francis, and been accepted to my first artists residency), but of course the biggest change for me and all of you and likely everyone around the globe has been the coronavirus pandemic. 

With that in mind, I discovered The Decameron for the first time last week, and I've also been pleased to see a couple modern-day equivalents pop up, including this excellent one, which last week published a poem I wrote back in October, "A Great Pestilence in the Air."

Stay safe out there, friends. We'll all be together again soon.

Feeling the Love: Building Community through #DartmouthLoveStory - Higher Ed Experts Marketing Memo

I was so excited to be asked to write a Marketing Memo for Higher Ed Experts, a great professional group that offers lots of different types of online courses, conferences, and articles for higher education professionals.

My marketing memo is a case study of one of our most successful social media campaigns, #DartmouthLoveStory. One of my favorite pieces to put together each year, the Love Story interviews dozens of Dartmouth alumni couples. In my marketing memo, I cover how the story and adjacent social media campaign meet my department's mission, and discuss the history and future of the story. I hope you'll give it a read!

Five Important Money Things I’m Glad I Did Right In My 20s - Article on The Financial Diet

It's been a couple years since I last wrote for The Financial Diet, but I'm super pumped to have another post up today, this time about the Five Important Money Things I'm Glad I Did Right in My 20s.

I really love writing about personal finance, and although I spent most of 2016 doing freelance commercial finance writing, it feels good to get back into the softer world of PF blogs. Give the article a read through, and let me know in the comments if you did anything right in your 20s!

New Photos on High Snobiety

I was pretty thrilled when a friend texted me this screenshot and said, "Is that Roger?"

It is indeed a photo of my partner, who I've recently been trying to convince to become a male model! I took this photo about a year and a half ago, when Roger was getting his second tattoo.

I just started taking a photography class a few weeks ago, so you can imagine how excited I was to see a few of my older photos featured on the site. Below, you can see the originals, and one that wasn't included of the tattoo itself. If you'd like to see them in their new habitat, visit High Snobiety's list.

Thanks for including us in your feature, High Snobiety!

Poem in Word for/Word

Three of my favorite poems got picked up for Word for/Word's 26th issue, and I couldn't be more thrilled with the format they've come out in. "Sea Song," "On the Shore Where the Sand Darkens by the Breaking Sea," and "Lazarus" are three pieces I really love, and I hope you'll have a read of them and of the other great pieces included in this issue.

"Sea Song" and "Lazarus" both have a touch of magical realism to them, and "Lazarus" of course hearkens back to my interest in biblical reinterpretations. I think of "On the Shore Where the Sand Darkens by the Breaking Sea" as one of my seashore and colonial America poems. I hope you enjoy them!

5 Things You Need To Do To Be Awesome At In-Person Networking - Article on The Financial Diet

I've been reading The Financial Diet for a few months now, and really fell in love with Chelsea and Lauren's practical advice and clean writing style. The whole blog feels written just for me—someone interested in her career and budgeting, but also in making time and space in my life for pleasure. Part personal finance blog, and part lifestyle blog, I really love it to bits and hope you will too.

I'm very excited to have written a new piece on networking for them, "5 Things You Need To Do To Be Awesome At In-Person Networking." If the idea of networking makes you a little nervous, go have a read, and then check out How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the best career books I've ever read. I hope you find it useful!

[Edited to add:] I now have two more blog posts up at The Financial Diet: "Five Unexpected Places to Meet People in Your Industry" and "Flipping the Tables: Five Essential Questions to Ask Your Job Interviewer." If you wanted to have a read, I'd love that!

Global Barfly Companion Posts on The Drunken Odyssey

In April and May, I was excited to publish two more Global Barfly Companion posts on The Drunken Odyssey.

April 27th's post was about Sea Witch, a great little nautical bar in my neighborhood.

 

May 25th's post was about 61 Local, one of the best literary bars in Brooklyn.

I hope you'll have a read over them and maybe check out one of these two great literary Brooklyn bars soon!

External Affairs: Five Tips for Successfully Collaborating with Freelancers - Article on Young to Publishing

I'm rather behind on keeping this News section updated, so my apologies if you've already seen everything I'll be talking about this week, but I wanted to be sure to share everything, since I'm the archivist of my own life.

On May 2nd, Young to Publishing posted my article, "External Affairs: Five Tips for Successfully Collaborating with Freelancers." I've been very lucky to work with some incredible freelancers, and to learn a lot from them as I figured out my own writing style.

If you're working with any freelancers or if you're looking to hire someone to collaborate with soon, I hope you'll check it out!

Finance 101: How to Thrive in NYC (on a Publishing Budget) - Article on Young to Publishing

I'm really proud of my most recent article, "Finance 101: How to Thrive in NYC (on a Publishing Budget)," which went live on Young to Publishing last night.

Personal finance is one of my big interests, and I've been looking to break into writing about money recently. After living on a publishing budget for almost a decade, I'm really excited to share my tips, and I hope someone living on a lower salary in a big city benefits from it. I'm also hopeful this will open the doors for more financial writing in the future.

Hop on over to YPG and have a read! (And if you're new to publishing, definitely take a look at joining YPG. They host fantastic events almost every week, and it's a great way to meet other young professionals trying to find their way in the industry.)

How Poetry Made Me A Better Copywriter - Article on Live in the Grey

A friend introduced me to Live in the Grey a few months ago when I mentioned that I'd been considering a career change. They have a very interesting philosophy of merging personal passions and your career, and I realized that's exactly what I've done by becoming a copywriter. I decided to tell a bit of my story for their site, and explain why I think being a poet has helped my copywriting career.

Have a read here: How Poetry Made Me A Better Copywriter.

Top 5 Nautical Bars in NYC Article on Nautical by Nature

You might not know that I'm a little bit of a nautical enthusiast, despite actually spending very little time on the water most years. Maybe it was summers in Rhode Island growing up or lifeguarding in high school and college or just being a Pisces, but I'm a water baby through and through, and while I don't have a boat and usually don't make it to the beach as much in a summer as I would like to, I do spend a lot of time thinking about it, and sometimes drinking about it.

Last week, my guest post on the Top 5 Nautical Bars in New York City went live on Nautical by Nature. I hope you'll have a read, and then maybe we can meet up for a cocktail one day soon. The weather's getting warmer, after all, and I think the waves are calling your name.

And why, might you ask, are my latest freelance pieces all about bars? Well, I'm not sure, but I've been reading a Faulkner biography, so maybe that has just put me in the mood for a bit of barhopping.

Global Barfly Article on The Drunken Odyssey

I'm very excited to have helped start a new blog series on The Drunken Odyssey, a forum founded by John King to discuss all aspects of the writing process, in a variety of genres, in order to foster a greater sense of community among writers.

The series is called the Global Barfly's Companion, and as a monthly feature, it will cover literary bars across the world, focusing a bit on their history, their current state, and what book to bring if you go. The very first post is up today, my piece on the White Horse Tavern, the well-known haunt of Dylan Thomas. I hope you'll have a read!

I'm also very excited about some other pieces from across the globe that will come up over the next few months, and if you have a literary bar near you that you'd like to write about, get in touch with John. I'm sure he'd love to hear from you!

Poem in VerseWrights

I've got one more poem up at VerseWrights today, "This is the Last Time I Will Ever See You." It's one of my more personal poems, about my hometown and high school, which was a weird, conservative place and time generally. It's maybe or maybe not worth noting that I did actually reconnect with the subject of this poem about a year ago, and despite everything I'd wondered all the long years between when the action of the poem happened and when we reconnected, she was just existing and living out her dreams in the way I hope everyone I've ever loved is existing and living out their dreams. There was nothing to worry about, this whole time.

And how rare, to have a photo of the exact moment of a poem:

Please hop over to VerseWrights, where you can have a read. They have a two-column set up there, so the lines don't read straight across. I know that's a totally normal convention, but for some reason, the tabbed break has never worked for me, so I've also reproduced it below, if you'd like to have a read that way. I hope you enjoy!

Article in the Mahopac News

A fact that is still stunning to me is that I graduated from high school over ten years ago. To celebrate, members from my class got together over the holidays for our reunion and I covered it for my hometown newspaper, The Mahopac News.

You can read the article, which appeared as last week's cover story, here. And, just one small correction: All of the images were taken by Matt Norden, who did an an incredible job working the camera all night.

Poems in VerseWrights

Carl Sharpe, founder of VerseWrights, contacted me a few weeks ago, and I was very excited to learn about his project, which gathers poetry from emerging and established poets from across the world. They recently featured Charles Bane, Jr., who I interviewed for my Writer Wednesday series a few months ago, and I'm glad to join him and many other great poets there now!

VerseWrights is featuring four of my poems, "Prehistory," "What Does the Fox Say?," "The Harvest Already Planted," and "Patty Party."

"Prehistory" and "Patty Party" delve a bit into my complicated relationship with my hometown and memories from growing up there. (No names were changed to protect the innocent in "Patty Party." This makes me a bit nervous.) "What Does the Fox Say?" is inspired by that song and also a nightmare I had and also this weird little ritual phone call opening my mother and I had for a number of years any time I would call crying about something. "The Harvest Already Planted" is one of very few prose poems I've written, and it's sort of half about my cat and half about Rapunzel.

Hmmm, does that create more questions than answers? Then have a read over here.

Article on A Practical Wedding

Very excited to announce that that my piece, "Self-Portrait with Beehive" is up on A Practical Wedding this morning!

I found A Practical Wedding when a friend was planning her small lunch reception in 2009. (Fittingly, she was actually the one who complimented my hair at her own wedding.) Even though getting married couldn't be further from my mind at that point, I loved the website for its fun combination of feminism, relationship advice, and community. I actually met some of my closest friends through the site.

And, a few of them helped me edit this piece, which I'm so excited to have up on APW today. I wrote about hair, a topic that weighs on my mind as heavily as it does on most American women's, I think. (I actually prepared for an oral exam on hair in Civil War literature back in college, which was fascinating, by the way.) I think our hair is a symbol of so many things, and for me, cutting it short meant freedom.  But first, there was one hairstyle I had to try.

I hope you'll have a read! And just in case you're wondering, here's what it looked like:

Photo by Frank and Telmo of Natural Expressions NY

Review of The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates - Better in Real Life

A few months ago, I saw Lauren's call for reader/reviewers for her Better in Real Life Book List, and was so excited to participate. I was assigned The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates, and I reviewed it along with two other incredibly smart and perceptive women, Liz and Victoria. It was really interesting to read the reviews and see how different all of our takes on it were.

Take a look, and let me know if you've read it or hope to!

Guest Post - 3Up Adventures

I'm guest posting at 3Up Adventures while Beth is having an incredible time #tryingstuff over in Jordan for the week with Columbia Sportswear. I wrote about spending my most recent birthday cross-country skiing, and how I learned to let go of my preconceived notions about how an adventure should go in order to actually enjoy myself in the moment. Hop on over to her site to read the whole post!

Poem in Phantom Kangaroo

When I found Phantom Kangaroo last year, I was instantly enamored with Claudia Lamar's creation.  Their description of the magazine and the poems within it is so much better than any I can come up with, so I'm just going to reproduce it in full here:

Doesn't that make you want to read every single thing they publish? I'm lucky enough to have a poem published in Issue 18, and I hope you'll give it a read.  "Murder Poem" started as an extensive and exhaustive five-page piece, written during a class I took with Rachel Zucker on the long poem.  The form finally allowed me to get everything out - my intense fear of being murdered, anxiety dreams I've had since I was a child, and a violence that seems to intrinsically underlie heterosexual relationships - into one poem.  I felt liberated with the form, and took on a number of similarly epic topics. Workshopping it the following semester, though, it became clear that the poem was too much, and because of how exhaustive it was, it wasn't being effective in the way I needed it to be.  With a lot of deep editing, it became clear that it was really a sonnet, and a sonnet it stayed.  It still gets at all the same things, but in a much cleaner format, and I hope that makes it a much more effective piece.

And, if you're interested, tomorrow at 10pm, they'll be hosting a reading with poets from Issue 18 and their archives.  Tune in on their Google+ page!