Annie Shares News Volume 2 Issue 9 September 2022

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Wonderful Things Afoot

The creative life is often compared to an ebb and flow, like tidal or moon phases. The last two months were a prime example. I barely wrote anything more than email correspondence due to being removed from our home of thirty years no thanks to asbestos contamination in our old floors. During a vacation in temporary housing via an Airbnb to await the asbestos abatement and installation of new floors, no thanks to hurricane Ida, I managed only one poem. I disconnected and it was probably for the best. I read, I soaked in the blessed silence, basked in the sun, brushed Bailey until my arm was tired, took in the evocative smells of country living and scratched my bug bites with complete complacency.

The day prior to our return the stress flared and another two weeks of creative cut-off overtook me, but this time it wasn’t attributed to adjusting to the ambiance of country living and black bears eating the tasty apples from the tree in the yard next to us. It was frustration and disappointment that shut me down. Our home was in chaos. Boxes from floor to ceiling, many of them unmarked. It was beyond dirty, our appliances were unplugged and left to leak all over the kitchen floor.  The list goes on but it is behind us now. It was a helpless feeling, for sure.

The lifeline appeared when I attended a few writing-related zoom meetings. The first was the regular Friday afternoon Writing Works Wonders  Community Call podcast streamed by the ACB Media Network. It helped me reconnect with my creativity by providing a writing prompt and it resulted in a poem which will be in a sweet little online literary pub called the Plum Tree Tavern. Then, the following week, the WWW hosts Kathy and Cheryl provided a second prompt that resulted in yet another poem, posted below, which was well received by other writers and is looking for a publication home.

Thanks to a fellow author and editor, Robert Kingett, I signed up for an open mic call and I read five of my more recent poems and was thrilled to receive high praise from the listeners. The facilitator followed up with me resulting in an opportunity to record one of my guide dog poems. It will be added to a poetry project for the  Chicago Public Library.

While writing is solitary, the sharing of it is not; the sharing is what pushes me to write, to create and keep a productive mindset.   Being good at something like writing and hearing others say my writing is good gives me a feeling of belonging and purpose. I’d lost those two aspects of self when I became blind and reclaiming them over the years felt like gluing the jagged pieces of my soul back together.

Opportunities abound, from online writing prompts given by Writing Works Wonders to focused feedback and email lists to connect like   in the writer’s group, Behind Our Eyes. One never knows where the opportunities and connections will appear but one thing is sure, striving to produce good writing and sharing it with readers is the goal.

I value you all, it is you, the reader, the listener, the literary compatriots, for whom I write. I will keep writing as long as you keep reading and listening.

Summer’s Book

By Ann Chiappetta ©

August is

A perpetual ending

Of wilting haiku blossoms

Of Heat and drought and rain on wind chimes

Of crisp leaflets capturing autumn’s promise and

open fields of earth’s parchment

awaiting to harvest and scribe

richness into Nature’s book with stories of Winter white.

2022

Dreya sends her fanciful smile your way, what’s better than a book dragon asking her friends to read more books?

Dreya the red and green book dragon smiles and floats in the air with her best friends, winged books and musical notes.