Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’ll have a short (30,000 word) memoir published by Kindle Singles. It’s been a new adventure for me to work with the folks over there for the past six months – an editor, a copyeditor, another editor, a cover designer.

In the last month, I’ve been sticking to a regular writing schedule, getting up at 5:30 am and writing until 7 am when I have to get ready for the day job. This is a practice I’ve often thought I “should” do, and somehow, miraculously, I’m doing it! But I’ve worried that having a book published will make me press the “Pause” button as I obsess over its reception, or lack of reception.

Luckily, I came across this blog post today by the excellent Sydney Lea, who was one of my mentors in the 1990’s at Vermont College of FIne Arts, and also after that. He says “I also seem to go into lulls shortly after the publication of books, and my twelfth collection, No Doubt the Nameless, was published last month. I suppose a psychologist could make something of that tendency to lapse after a book shows up, but it’s not really something that especially troubles me. I used to think, “Uh-oh, I’m all done– out of material.” But I have learned that I seem to revive.”

So I”ll try to chill, like Syd.

A new iteration of the “Family Trees for Bastards” series will be on the front page of the journal concīs for a few days, and then available eternally in its digital archives at http://concis.io/issues/summer-2016/leavitt-family-trees/.  Thank you to editor Chris Lott.

concīs

min words | max heart

Dinty Moore, the editor extraordinaire of Brevity, features one of our HipChicksOnWriting videos today on the Brevity blog.

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/youre-so-brave-hip-chicks-on-writing-memoir/

As a recovering English teacher, I know how the word “research” can effect people. Start talking about research in a college classroom, and it can look like your students have joined the zombie apocalypse. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Now I’m a HipChick

In this video, my favorite memoirist, Sandra Gail Lambert, and I talk about three different kinds of research activities for memoir writers: interviewing people, mining personal documents, and interpreting scholarly sources.

Sandra Gail Lambert and I chat about bravery – in writing and otherwise.

Check out the May issue of this beautiful online journal, Hermeneutic Chaos, which includes a new poem, “Os,” that’s outside of my usual range – free verse and a little surreal.

I also learned today that a (much revised) series of the “Family Trees for Bastards” will be published in the journal concīs later this year.

It’s no one’s fault this tree’s heartwood is all that’s left standing, that its bark and outer trunk lie shorn around it. This deep in the woods, and far enough from a lumber road, you can be sure the shearing is not the work of man. Pileated woodpeckers, bark beetles, fungi, old age, and weather are the only actors here. Maybe some microscopic disease.

In another generation or two, the heartwood will be less than history, and more than history. Even now, the air and other roots absorb its molecules. No one’s fault, no one’s shame.

Springs of varying magnitudes feed the Ichetucknee river, and so do rains. The river’s levels rise and fall. Today, the water is high, and the river flows into the cypress swamps spreading out alongside it.

On calm days of great amplitude, the trees multiply and stretch a second self onto the river’s surface. We don’t know any better than to call these new trees reflections.

I could slide from my kayak into this tree’s reflection  and dive right into its open womb.