Friday, August 6, 2010
Saturday, July 31, 2010
At Buckroe Beach (for my daughter, Afiya)
Published in Longstoryshort.com, 2010
Watching her
it has been eighteen years
Out of corner of my eye, I thought
sun slanted peachcream into us
I have to remember
a tightly curled ponytail, shades covering her eyes
Her shadowed hair
buckroe beach crumpled beneath
The way sun creams down on
untender touch of sand castle builders.
Brown of her shoulders like a praise.
she used to be that little black girl, ashened
Like sharks whispering reverence near us in cool crystal deep
pushing grains into submission
A daughter’s cusp eyes
folding salt and water into imagery mote.
Young, at the beginning of life’s edge where
she laughs at high yellow girl who, unaware,
Chipped bones of ancestors wade, pushing prayers
threw her own hairpiece at another screaming friend
Into her old timey eyes, recognizing kin. They know my daughter,
triffling, curl of afiya’s mouth say.
Like rocking chairs and lamps that flicker out
jellyfish slip up next to her, translucent with longing
At first lightning crack, at first thunder strike
desperate for the kiss, the flesh of her.
Her knowing, full in the mouth of a storm.
i turn
No paper, no pencil
she is at once the girlchild I raised, washed, kept
I turned
and the woman who will leave me behind
A space, then nothing between us
i look again and she is just my daughter
The salt rising
walking beside me, laughing.
This moment
It has been eighteen years
The last, the first
as sun slanted peach rain against our arms, lips
I memorize it, thinking, I must remember
there was a poem here somewhere.
Everything.
(c) Shonda Buchanan
Watching her
it has been eighteen years
Out of corner of my eye, I thought
sun slanted peachcream into us
I have to remember
a tightly curled ponytail, shades covering her eyes
Her shadowed hair
buckroe beach crumpled beneath
The way sun creams down on
untender touch of sand castle builders.
Brown of her shoulders like a praise.
she used to be that little black girl, ashened
Like sharks whispering reverence near us in cool crystal deep
pushing grains into submission
A daughter’s cusp eyes
folding salt and water into imagery mote.
Young, at the beginning of life’s edge where
she laughs at high yellow girl who, unaware,
Chipped bones of ancestors wade, pushing prayers
threw her own hairpiece at another screaming friend
Into her old timey eyes, recognizing kin. They know my daughter,
triffling, curl of afiya’s mouth say.
Like rocking chairs and lamps that flicker out
jellyfish slip up next to her, translucent with longing
At first lightning crack, at first thunder strike
desperate for the kiss, the flesh of her.
Her knowing, full in the mouth of a storm.
i turn
No paper, no pencil
she is at once the girlchild I raised, washed, kept
I turned
and the woman who will leave me behind
A space, then nothing between us
i look again and she is just my daughter
The salt rising
walking beside me, laughing.
This moment
It has been eighteen years
The last, the first
as sun slanted peach rain against our arms, lips
I memorize it, thinking, I must remember
there was a poem here somewhere.
Everything.
(c) Shonda Buchanan
Friday, July 30, 2010
Montana...
Sitting atop the Hayes, Montana mountain on Ft. Belknap reservation, my husband and I grinned at each other like kids with cookies. It was the 4th of July. We had made it. Only here for a couple days, we gazed hungrily down into the valley that held our friends' home, and their 35 dogs and pups, their 30 horses and 10 llamas that they breed. Everywhere color. The green hills were so green you felt like if you licked it you'd taste lime. The skies were a seamstress blue, and you almost smell the thread, the woman's hands and the lavender stitches being sew into the shifting cotton clouds. It was good to sit with the dog, Meggie, who'd attached herself to as our guardians and just look and look. For miles Indian country. As we drove from LA, I couldn't help think, 'this is all Indian country.' Our journey from LA had been filled with surprises, Wyoming and Utah held such beauty, even the outskirts of Las Vegas floored us, but the most startling testament of how our country still echos with past discrimination were signs like the one in Idaho saying, "Warning to Tourists: Do Not Laugh at the Natives." My husband whipped his head around as we drove past, "did you see that?" He made me turn around so he could take a picture. It's on my Facebook page, and every time I look at it, I can't help but think who are the real "Natives?" So much has changed since 1492. But when we see a sign that has to remind tourists not the guffaw at the "Natives," i.e., Native Americans, the indigenous people of that land, I think maybe not much has changed. But on that mountaintop in Montana, for the moment, we could dream...
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Across a Country
On June 6th or 7th, my daughter and I packed up our Rav 4 and revved the engine. After saging the wheels, blessing our journey, we pulled out of the driveway and into a summer adventure that has become oddly and not so oddly, a representation of my life as a mother, writer, professor, a RedBlack, and poet. All of these things are what I want to look at, and to lay out for discussion. My observations of this gorgeous country, our towns, and the way we lodge people, or (Arizona) expel people despite and often because of our sameness and yet, those perceived and real vast divides. And most definitely how we are still all in the pathway of nature, and maybe of our own selves. So, I will try to keep the pics and postings coming on a regular weekly basis until work starts back up at the end of August. Maybe some of them will appear before in a couple of newspapers, magazines, or online publications. If I'm lucky, and time permits, I will continue writing into the winter and spring. this is my hope. I will share but I hope to hear your thoughts echoing back to me. Until the first post later this week...
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Tips for Budding Writers
Tips for Budding Writers
Because I can’t leave the country for Haiti right now, I decided to write the things I’ve been meaning to write, and have to write for various reasons. I am working on my website and want to give something back to the budding writers who have supported me over the years in my workshops and lectures.
1) If you want to be a writer, hang around other writers. Go to coffee houses, book stores and libraries that offer writing workshops, lectures, and book discussions. Talk about writing, about the authors, about their work, their strategies and techniques.
2) Join your local community, state and national writing organizations. National writing organizations such as www.awpwriter.org and www.pen.com have conferences and host author series. Both are extremely supportive of new, emerging and established writers.
3) Get on the list serves of writing organizations and foundations.
4) Subscribe to Poets and Writers Magazine, http://www.pw.org or the Writer’s Chronicle, http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/index.htm. They support writers and offer contests, conferences, awards, scholarships, fellowships, excellent articles, interviews and tips about becoming a successful writer.
5) Attend writing conferences. Octavia Butler was the first person to tell me that writing conferences were more about networking then the workshops. However, the workshops were helpful too. Don’t be afraid to meet a writer, shake their hands. Don’t be afraid to talk to agents after a panel discussion and tell them what you’re working on. Establish a relationship that might be the beginning of a ten-year friendship or partnership. Always keep your contacts.
6) Submit to contests you can afford! Submitting to contests can cost a lot of money, so before you submit, make sure the poem, essay, or piece of writing fits the criteria and readership of the publication.
7) Follow the guidelines of the contest strictly or your work will be returned.
8) Keep a log of submissions so you are not sending out simultaneous submissions, or know if a publication allows this.
9) Spell the editor(s) name correctly; put their correct title and address.
10) Also send an SASE (self addressed stamped envelop).
11) Be succinct in your cover (query) letter. Print out and review a draft of your letter before you send it out to catch any mistakes or errors.
12) Set up a writing schedule that you can live with, one around your job or busy life.
13) Treat your writing like a real career. Set up a schedule. Honor it. Even if it’s an hour a day or every other day. Make it your writing time. Don’t move from your desk even if you haven’t written a word. Eventually, you’ll write something like, “boy, do I wish I was doing something else.” Baby steps.
14) Remember there’s a difference between craft and career. One is how you write, revise and engage and the other is how you put your work out in the world.
Gabriel García Márquez said in a Playboy Magazine interview years ago that he wrote so his “friends would love him,” but he said in that same interview that “if you cannot live without writing, then you should not be a writer.” Don’t write for fame or fortune; write because you have a story to tell that no one else can tell.
Please feel free to add comments of your own for budding writers. Thanks in advance for helping answer any questions this community might have that I haven't answered here.
Because I can’t leave the country for Haiti right now, I decided to write the things I’ve been meaning to write, and have to write for various reasons. I am working on my website and want to give something back to the budding writers who have supported me over the years in my workshops and lectures.
1) If you want to be a writer, hang around other writers. Go to coffee houses, book stores and libraries that offer writing workshops, lectures, and book discussions. Talk about writing, about the authors, about their work, their strategies and techniques.
2) Join your local community, state and national writing organizations. National writing organizations such as www.awpwriter.org and www.pen.com have conferences and host author series. Both are extremely supportive of new, emerging and established writers.
3) Get on the list serves of writing organizations and foundations.
4) Subscribe to Poets and Writers Magazine, http://www.pw.org or the Writer’s Chronicle, http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/index.htm. They support writers and offer contests, conferences, awards, scholarships, fellowships, excellent articles, interviews and tips about becoming a successful writer.
5) Attend writing conferences. Octavia Butler was the first person to tell me that writing conferences were more about networking then the workshops. However, the workshops were helpful too. Don’t be afraid to meet a writer, shake their hands. Don’t be afraid to talk to agents after a panel discussion and tell them what you’re working on. Establish a relationship that might be the beginning of a ten-year friendship or partnership. Always keep your contacts.
6) Submit to contests you can afford! Submitting to contests can cost a lot of money, so before you submit, make sure the poem, essay, or piece of writing fits the criteria and readership of the publication.
7) Follow the guidelines of the contest strictly or your work will be returned.
8) Keep a log of submissions so you are not sending out simultaneous submissions, or know if a publication allows this.
9) Spell the editor(s) name correctly; put their correct title and address.
10) Also send an SASE (self addressed stamped envelop).
11) Be succinct in your cover (query) letter. Print out and review a draft of your letter before you send it out to catch any mistakes or errors.
12) Set up a writing schedule that you can live with, one around your job or busy life.
13) Treat your writing like a real career. Set up a schedule. Honor it. Even if it’s an hour a day or every other day. Make it your writing time. Don’t move from your desk even if you haven’t written a word. Eventually, you’ll write something like, “boy, do I wish I was doing something else.” Baby steps.
14) Remember there’s a difference between craft and career. One is how you write, revise and engage and the other is how you put your work out in the world.
Gabriel García Márquez said in a Playboy Magazine interview years ago that he wrote so his “friends would love him,” but he said in that same interview that “if you cannot live without writing, then you should not be a writer.” Don’t write for fame or fortune; write because you have a story to tell that no one else can tell.
Please feel free to add comments of your own for budding writers. Thanks in advance for helping answer any questions this community might have that I haven't answered here.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Haiti Watch
Where are we? Who are we? Don’t we ask these kinds of questions when there is nothing we can do about the damage afterwards. The damage done. But let us try. It is 2010, and the pandemic of poverty in the first black republic of our times did not make any of it any easier. Everything, shelters, economy, infrastructures were already fragile there. And now… Everyone has said everything that can be said. But we must say more, what we can. What has happened to the country and people of Haiti has provided for us a new definition for the words, tragedy, catastrophic, calamity. The executive director of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) said something else very interesting on NPR yesterday. He said Haiti needs an entire restructuring of government, infrastructure and public policy. But who will do it? Him, us? I wish, hope, wish we could trust those words. That they will produce something. Hope, wish, hope Haiti will be taken good care of in the hands of the world. In our hands. Yes, send money. Yes, if you can, when it is safe and your job will not fire you, make your way there. But we have seen how history has dealt Haiti all the double-faced cards in the deck. Who are we? Where are we? It was 1994 or 5. I remember the day Aristide was spirited off the island of Haiti years ago by the CIA after a military coup. That is another story, but it is almost as if I can still see his light leaving Haiti across the wounded sky. Aristide was a poet..I wonder what Aristide’s pen is writing now.
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