Love, Love, Love

Like many people in the USA today, I woke up to the sad news about South Carolina. My radio alarm came on to wake me for lap swimming, and it told me about an old church...I feared a hurricane had taken it...but it was the shooting instead. Oh, dear. So I counter that hate with love. Here is a photo, taken by my daughter, at a wedding we attended in South Carolina. We know there is love there, and beauty. Healing thoughts, people. I've been busy (and gone), and reading, and swimming. I'm sure I'll be back to blogging soon.

Wardrobe

What a delight to have been featured this week in The Wardrobe's Best Dressed series in The Sundress Blog. (And probably my favorite kind of dress is a sundress, from childhood on! And one of my recent calendars came from Sundress Publications; it featured the men of Sundress--in sundresses!) The current series curator is Donna Vorreyer, a poet I admire, so I am doubly/triply/quadruply honored!

The Wardrobe contains poems from my recent chapbook, Interior Sculpture: poems in the voice of Camille Claudel (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), which arose from a collaboration with Columbus Dance Theatre on the production of Claudel, about the life and work of Camille Claudel, a sculptor, whose work lives in the Rodin Museum in Paris. We hope that someday Claudel will be performed in Paris, too!

You can find the poems here:

"After Rodin"

"Broken Figure"

"Red Umbrella"

"The Photograph by Carjat"

"Liquidamabar"

And the book here! Many thanks to Sundress and Donna Vorreyer for featuring the poems and the book!

Joy

All 3 of us called our mom today, and our dad. And I was lucky enough to see both my kids--one in Chicago and one in central Illinois, thanks to Amtrak. Thanks for the chocolates and the flowers, my dear ones! Thanks for all the joy. Thanks for being born. Thanks to my hubby for Chinese food by candlelight with our daughter during a power outage. And now it's so late that Mother's Day has turned into a Blue Monday in the blog. Clearly, we're not blue here.

New Word, New Month

This April has been the busiest month ever, but now it's May, it's May, the lusty month of May, and it's also Slattern Day in the blog, so I'm celebrating with a new word I learned from Grandiloquent Word of the Day: Cover-slut, evidently a real apron! I will also celebrate by getting grubby again in the back yard, gardening, just puttering and stopping rather quickly to read and write, and then tracking in new-mown grass, and then sort of sweeping the kitchen floor.

Other things to celebrate: History Makers 2015!

My parents being among them! As it happens, I write the script for the entertainment for this event (part of my busy April), so it's been fun to revisit the stories of their lives as well as learning more about the other two honorees. In the banner picture at the museum website, you can see my mom at last year's event: blue dress, long braid down her back!

To Russia with Love

OK, the Russian thing just keeps happening, meaning coincidences involving Russia. First, here are some lovely matryoshka, made of glass, by Masha Emmons. They were her senior art project, purchased for display at the Center for Liberal Arts at Illinois Wesleyan University, where one of her paintings will also hang in the Ames Library. (A bit of extra delight: Ames Library was a favorite reading spot for Chris Al-Aswad, who founded Escape Into Life.) And wouldn't you know, our EIL reviewer, Scott Klavan, has just reviewed Dr. Zhivago, the musical.

This caused me to remember that when I read the Boris Pasternak novel as a teen, I loved it. "What did you like best?" my parents asked me. "The poetry," I answered, surprising even myself. Surely I loved the love story and the battle of political philosophies. But I do remember when I turned to the back of the book and found all the poems there, I was struck by the magic of it; it made it all so real. As it was!

And we've had a weensy return to winter here, temps in the 30s. So it's definitely a Random Coinciday, as well as a Russian Hump of the Week!