Girls! Girls! Girls!

Girls? More like Chatty Cathies! [pictured: Danielle Jones-Pruett, Lis Horowitz (back to camera), Colleen Michaels, and Dawn Paul.]

On Wednesdays, I usually spend the morning at the Salem Athenaeum writing and revising with members of the Salem Writers Group. But because the Salem Poetry Seminar is using the Athenaeum space, we gathered at Danielle's home instead. Yes, we wrote. Yes, we talked about talked about poetry and publishing. Yes, we talked about Danielle's color-coded-by-month card catalogue for submissions (it is a thing of beauty!). Yes, we ate coffee cake! And yes, we laughed a lot!

What I love about our group--which today is all female but normally we do have a Y chromosome or two in the mix--is that whenever I feel stuck or frustrated with my own work, these poets always help me find the answer. Always. Whenever I have days that lead to blog posts like yesterday's Confession Tuesday post, I can talk it out with my poetry peeps.

This is my community.

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Books currently on order from Amazon:

Sandra Beasley - I Was the Jukebox
Kathleen Flenniken - Plume
Tracy K. Smith - Life on Mars (I read a borrowed copy--wish I had owned it before the Pulizter lunch. Drat!)

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There was universal feeling among the ladies that if an unfortunate accident were to happen to one of us, Sandra's Beasley's poem "I Don't Fear Death" should be read at the funeral.