This is a great way to get little bits of writing done. There’s a single-word prompt for each day, and the idea is that you write 250-500 word story using the word in the prompt. Then you post it on Instagram, or share a link via Instagram, using the hashtag #NatWriCoChallenge.
Do that for 30 days and possibly with 2 sessions with a writing coach.
I, of course, can’t enter in to win. That’s just silly. But I plan on participating.
(Disclaimer- I proofread this post a dozen times and used Grammarly to help. If you see any mistakes, I’m only human. And I am not perfect. Thanks for reading and please share!)
Dear “Scared White People”,
Hi. My name is Nyikia and I am a concerned black woman. And just so I’m clear here from the start: This is NOT CLICK-BAIT and I’m not talking to ALL WHITE PEOPLE. Nor, and I can’t even believe I have to say this, racist. I have the working knowledge to know that people of color have white allies out there. Thank you for that and this letter isn’t for you. I’m writing this letter to the “scared” or “concerned” white people out there because I’m growing quite worried (and pissed off) by your behavior toward black people. I have listed a few examples to clarify:
1.) Calling the police when black people are…
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This Exquisite Corpse is the debut poetry collection of Tawnya Selene Renelle, creating a tapestry of real, raw images of life of a woman loving women, loving men, in grief, in family, in being whole through having been broken.
‘A book of deviance,’ says one review. ‘A keenly observed collection,’ of poems which ‘lay down challenges to the reader,’ says another review. Renelle’s collection makes the reader delightfully uncomfortable, while comforting the women who can relate to so many parts of her art.
Of it, Colin Herd writes in the introduction,
The poet June Jordan once asked “how do we come to be here next to each other / in the night.” This question of adjacency, of how our bodies inhabit spaces in relation to other bodies, is just one of the questions that animates this collection.
…Always, through its encounters with grief, break-up, loss, illness, addiction, self-examination, Renelle’s language is buoyant, and dazzles, twists, turns in unexpected ways.
…Tawnya Renelle’s poetry is urgent, echoing, and vibrant. Her images haunt, comfort and contort.
pp.i-ii, This Exquisite Corpse
I had the opportunity to interview Renelle regarding This Exquisite Corpse toward the beginning of her book tour.
The title actually comes from the game the surrealists play, Exquisite Corpse, and I really fell in love with it. And for me, the book contains both literal and figurative corpses: mine and those of my dead friends.
I often describe my poetry as raw and real. It is memoir and I write about my life experiences in the hopes that someone reading or listening can relate to it and maybe feel something about their own story. The power to tell it. I like to write simple poetry without metaphor.
I like to say I am a hybrid or experimental poet, that I really embrace the page and blank space and like to make sure I am putting words on the page in a way that creates accessibility, if that makes sense.
Not really. The poet Joy Harjo said, “I believe the word poet is synonymous with truth teller,” and I really believe that myself. I feel I have an obligation to truth in my words.
Something of their own experience, my ideal is that half way through reading a poem, the reader stops thinking about my life and begins to think about their own. That is the dream. When people come up to me after I read and tell me about their own life experiences I feel like I have done what I hope to: provide a way for people to connect to their life by sharing information about my own.
Embodiment, or rather the body in periods of love, sex, grief, and pain. I really wanted to try and capture a lived experience in the body, it is also so much about connection, between family, friends, and lovers.
That is such a hard question. The poem I wrote for my grandmother has the line “our bond is not dependent on your knowing,”* and I do really love that one and have had many people tell me that it really impacts them as well.
And then the line, “if the overdose of my friend I learned what kind of people do drugs and somehow I am not one of them.”**
* A line from the poem, “For Grandmother” (p. 3)
**A line from the poem, “Passing” (p. 63)
I feel really good about it actually. She knows about the book, knows she can’t read it, and even knows about that line…she is the reason I write poetry. She put Emily Dickinson in my hands when I was young and taught me to love poetry and the written word. So the dedication to her is so true, to Grandmother for words she will never read. She knows I have poems that aren’t “grandma friendly” and she is just as supportive.
It was really amazing actually. I was so lucky because my friends have a cabin on their property and I went out to it for 2 days, and it was snowing. It felt magical really. And I just laid all the poems down before me on the floor and spent days deciding the order, making sure I was giving the reader emotional breaks from some of the more difficult poems, etc.
Wow, I hadn’t even noticed that actually, but I guess it is related to the death of my friends Gitana and Adam. There is such a dismantling that happens during grief and a need to put back together. And on top of this, during this period of time, I had a major back surgery and was physically putting myself back together while writing the poems. I can see why this theme shows up again and again.
So really writing the collection had a lot to do with both literal and figurative putting back together in an emotional and physical way.
I actually wrote all the poems in about a year, they just kept coming, and I couldn’t stop once I had started. The only poem that had been written over a long period of time was “Poetic Sexploration.” That poem is a constant work in progress. and a few poems were written very recently. Three of them were written about a week before we went to print.
I don’t ever intend to write anything that is political really, I just write about my life, and I know that it becomes political, if that makes sense. So I didn’t set out to write a collection of poetry that is feminist, but I recognize that it is, that it is body positive, queer, sex-positive, feminist, etc…and I like that it is. But for me it is just putting my experiences down on the page.
Oh yeah, well I love text on the page that challenges perceptions and I already know the content does that, so it has always been important to me that the book challenge what we think poems “should” look like. I wanted the intimacy of text messages for those 2 poems that really are about it, and “These are the names I have been called by men” is a poem I have always been scared to share with anyone and so we decided to sort of make it a center fold in a way to push the idea even further
This is also why image is included, why I have chosen to display my naked body, or corpse, if you will, in the text, especially after poems that deal with what it means to be a fat body in the world.
So many…I think all writers have multiple projects at one time. I have my textbook, or my redefining of textbook on hybrid and experimental forms through my DFA studies, which is a merging of poetry, critical theory, prose, memoir, and art. I am also working on a collection of poems about my travels around the UK and being an “ex-pat,” as well as a novella idea that I hope to write in the next few years.
I don’t think I really have specific questions I want to be asked. I like to think that someone could really ask me anything and that I would be open to it.
Tawnya Renelle is a PhD student at the Univseristy of Glasgow intitially from Bellingham, Washington.
Currently, Tawyna is on her book tour promoting This Exquisite Corpse. You can catch her on tour by following her blog here.
Twitter: @trenellepoetry
Instagram: @tawnyaremelle
You can also listen to a radio interview with her on Daytime/Nighttime for a chance to hear Renelle read some of her work.
This Exquisite Corpse is available online and soon to be in select book stores. To find it online in the UK, it is available on Amazon.
Amazon US available soon.
I have put zero dollars/pounds/pasos into this blog. None. Nada. Zippo. And it’s done alright. I mean, I’m also not making money off it, but I have a following I’m content with and pleased about.
However, with my other blog, I wanted to take it up a notch in an attempt to make some cash with it. Full disclosure–as of the end of April, I made a whole $0.17. That’s total. I’m pretty proud of that, and I’m rather fond of the number 17–but I digress.
There were a few features I wanted for my blog, like the ability to have text to speech for those who could use it (I’m still workin gon how to figure that out), and I needed a business account for it. I thought about it for a long while, and finally made the plunch. Gotta spend money to make money, right?
Also, my blog was getting pretty good views–by my standard, mind. Before upgrading to premium a couple of months ago I was averaging 20 views a day, which went up to 80, sometimes 100 views a day. I saw the correlation between the views and the upgrade, so that also contributed to my decision to go to the business plan.
However!
As soon as I did, my views plunged. Right back to the 20 views a day, if I’m lucky.
I didn’t understand what was going on. I now could use YOAST which allowed me to better understand and more efficiently utilise SEO, I was creating and posting the same quality and quantity of daily content–what gives?
I finally figured it out. Aside from the fact that for some reason all my search-engine go-ahead toggles had been switched off (which I remedied), my posts aren’t appearing the same in the WordPress reader. Thus, those who are following me aren’t able to read my blog the same way.
This was brought to my attention by another blogger, with whom I sometimes email back and forth, and she asked me what I did to get the ‘read the full post’ link on my posts. I went to my WordPress reader page, clicked on one of my posts, and sure enough,
I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but then this morning I realized that the majority of my traffic comes from other WordPress users. This means that either a) they’re not actually reading the full post and are just clicking on it so I get the view or b) they’re too lazy to click a button. The latter is totally fine–I actually do the same thing. There’s an Organic gardening blog that I’ll only click the link for if I’m super duper curious.
So I think that unless they click that link, I’m not getting the views. This has positives and negatives:
It means that the views I do have are more organic, and thus I kind of know how much of a readership I actually have.
However, it also means that I get a little let down every time I look at my puny view-count.
It’s all a learning experience, but I thought I’d share this particcular experience, seeing as others might want the heads up before upgradeing to Business plans.
Also–this is all theory. I haven’t confirmed that that is in fact the reason my views have gone down. However, it’s the most logical explanation I have so far.
Since this is language-related and writing-related, I thought I’d share my recent post from my other blog.
On Mondays, I like to do what I unofficially call ‘Monday Musings.’ I write something that’s on my mind about Tarot, which is what my other blog is about. Today’s musing was about how learning Tarot is like learning a new language.
Since I strongly believe that writers really need to pick up a set of divination cards or tools for their writing because it’s shockingly helpful (read Tarot-Inspired Life by Jayme Elford if you don’t believe me. She talks about using Tarot cards and Pendulums for writing), I thought I might stress that point here with this post.
Check out
6 Ways Learning Tarot is Learning a New Language
In spreads, the positions of the cards create the more complicated sentences. They’re what tell you that there are adjectives, adverbs, semi-colons, etc. Furthermore, these positions tell you how the sentence fits together using all of these fancy grammatical terms.
Scribing English All Over The Place 