Today at Medium, I write about crafting a "mission statement" for your writing career and how it can help you meet your goals. Thinking about your writing as a brand helps to combat self-rejection and imposter syndrome. It puts a bit of distance between you and your work — and that can be a lifesaver in the future when you’re looking at hard decisions about where to publish and why. Read the whole post here . . .
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I am on the radio today reading poetry! If you're in Houston you can catch my segment in the 2019 edition of Voices and Verses on Houston Public Media. Click above to listen!
In this sound portrait, Walrath describes how she fell in love with poetry in high school, her love of the weird and her inspirations. She reads her poem, “Blue Cadillac.” Blue Cadillac Oh, the way you sat in the drive, taking it all up. I climbed into your cool interior, sliding across the widest, darkest navy seats spread beyond me, beyond my vision. They seemed to expand and dissolve into a bright light on the driver’s side. We drove, through endless lanes of white picket fences, long green, green lawns, the Texas sun staccato in the trees, and it may be that I wore an Easter Sunday dress, all laced in white, and bows on my tights, or white slumping socks above black buckle shoes shining with polish. And in the heat of a Texas summer, how you could swallow me up in your blue dusty smell, that sweet sweet tobacco tucked into the glove compartment beside a lady’s silver lighter. For the sun merely seemed to enclose you, a line of gold light above the leather dash. But the very roundness of you, round seats and silver knobs and panels like porthole windows into another time, but mostly the round, stitched-leather steering wheel which was surely made for white driving gloves. And somehow in this memory of you, your massive lines like some primordial behemoth long since dead and buried in ice, the very blueness of you, I may have remembered myself, another classic beauty. This poem was published in my chapbook, Glimmerglass Girl. I have a new poem up today at Mirror Dance called Farewell Dead Men. I also talk about why fantasy is a genre I love: While science fiction is based in science, mystery is based in the pursuit of a question, and horror is based in evoking an emotion of fear, I believe that fantasy is the only genre which is purely pulled from the author’s deepest dreams and imaginings. The ability to dream up fantastical beasts and worlds seems to me to be a peculiarity of the human condition—one that even the most mundane of minds can learn to cultivate. Where did the idea for a dragon first come from or the hero myth? They are deeply ingrained paths that we continue to walk, following our ancestors through the mists of imagination. Read my poem "Farewell Dead Men" here . . . |
About the AuthorHolly Lyn Walrath is a freelance editor and author of poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction. Find her on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath
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