…I have broken the record from January 2024 by writing eighteen days in a row toward the goal of blogging every day during the first month of the new year, attempting each day to string together a few hundred to a thousand words that form coherent sentences and ideas. I’ve tried to vary the shoeContinue reading “On the Eighteenth Day of 2025…”
Tag Archives: creative writing
NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations
The point of any kind of forced creativity experience or challenge is to simply do the creative thing you want to be doing but perhaps wouldn’t be doing otherwise. I am all for it. I’ve done more than a decade worth of a poem every day in April, I’ve participated in songwriting challenges that resultedContinue reading “NaNoWriMo 2024: Adjusting My Expectations”
It’s National Novel Writing Month!
Here we are on the precipice of another year of attempting to write 50,000 words in a single month for the ritual of NaNoWriMo. This will be my third effort. I go into it this year with a bit of trepidation. I worry that the politics of the nation will be too much of aContinue reading “It’s National Novel Writing Month!”
Gone So Long, I Been Gone So Long
Sorry about that. I mean, I realize no one has been holding their breath, so the apology is mostly self-talk, or self-writing, as I think I do this blogging activity more as a personal practice and discipline than anything else. I don’t mean to imply that I am not mightily grateful for the readers IContinue reading “Gone So Long, I Been Gone So Long”
#500: On the Writing of 500 Poems
On the Writing of 500 Poems On April 1, 2013, I wrote the first poem I would everpublish as a blog post. Today, eleven years and fourteen days later, I write my 500th poemon the occasionof having written 500poems in eleven years. This doesn’t seem like nothing, but I know somepoets who have written aContinue reading “#500: On the Writing of 500 Poems”
Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: All Good Things. . .
Our time together had come to a close and I was alone in the dorm where we stayed at Macalester College for the annual Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Conference. It was strange, that quiet, after all that activity, after all that brilliant conversation, after the nightly readings and daily classes, the meals together three timesContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: All Good Things. . .”
Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Countdown T-Minus a Day and Some Change
I’ve got plane tickets, I’ve got plane snacks, I’ve got a new Moleskine notebook, I’ve got the new album by GLASYS, I’ve printed and practiced my reading, I’ve chosen some poems for morning meditation, I’ve packed my copies of Monster Talk, I got a tooth crowned, I got my hair cut, I got a copyContinue reading “Dispatches from Writer’s Camp: Countdown T-Minus a Day and Some Change”
Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Tropical Flesh Mandala
I slept for seven hours cuddled up with my tiny electric fan–literally. I thought maybe I’d roll over in the middle of the night and knock it off the mattress, or, worse, dreaming that I was snuggling with this machine, I might wake up with my hair caught in the fan blades. No, it was safeContinue reading “Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Tropical Flesh Mandala”
Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Organized Chaos
Well, to begin with, a Wally boy who shall go nameless (after doing an absolute killer reading from his new novel) came down to the porch at about 10 o’clock last night wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, and for the rest of the conference, I predict we will be asking him over andContinue reading “Dispatches From Writer’s Camp: Organized Chaos”
The Power of Retreat
The truth of the matter is I didn’t read a single word of Moby Dick. I remain today on the same page I was on a week ago. Thanks to the generosity and kindness of my wife and son, I have been on retreat for a week at St. Mary’s College in Moraga for theContinue reading “The Power of Retreat”
michael jarmer 