Blog – Top of JC’s Mind

One-Liner Wednesday: criticism

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
— Richard Rohr

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/06/one-liner-wednesday-enough-said/

This post is also part of #JusJoJan. http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/06/just-jot-it-january-6th-cloud/  I know that the majority of JusJoJan participants this year are doing the daily prompts, but I have been opting to do my own thing, which is the general operating procedure at Top of JC’s Mind, so I decided to follow the original plan which was to count One-Liner Wednesday as my daily JusJoJan post.

JJJ 2016

 

on the radio

This morning, I heard the first part of President Obama’s speech on gun violence and action against it. Near the beginning, he listed the major mass shootings that had happened during his presidency so far.

One of the sad realities of living in the United States is that there is a long list of mass shootings, so many that only certain of them are synonymous with the place in which they occurred.  Aurora, Fort Hood, and Newtown are among these during the Obama presidency.

But this morning, the President listed all the high-toll mass shootings. (In 2015 alone, there were over 350 mass shootings in the United Sates, using the definition of mass shooting as one with four or more victims, so the president was listing only those with the highest number of victims.)

Although the list was not chronological, one of the first cities he mentioned was Binghamton. (Binghamton is in New York State, near the Pennsylvania border about halfway across the state. The town where I have lived for over twenty-five years borders Binghamton.)

While I am grateful that Binghamton hasn’t been reduced to being shorthand for mass murder, I am sad that the shooting at the American Civic Association and its aftermath have been largely forgotten, its lessons about mental illness and access to guns, about discrimination and social acceptance, about civic pride, education, altruism, and the ideals of America as a welcoming community unheeded.

On the fifth anniversary of the ACA shootings, I wrote about why I think that is so.

Early last month, I posted about my thoughts on gun regulations and the Second Amendment.

I am grateful that President Obama is taking further common-sense steps to ensure that more background checks take place. I call on Congress – again – to take action to change the laws to protect people from gun violence.

The United States loses over 30,000 people every year to gunshots. If we were losing 30,000 people to plane crashes, it would be considered a calamity of the highest order and there would be swift action to rectify the situation.

The people of the United Sates deserve action – now.
*****
This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/05/just-jot-it-january-5th-2016-my-bucket-list/
JJJ 2016

What Is Your Country’s Best Literature?

Readers from around the world, Jay Dee needs your help! He is looking for book recommendations from as many countries as possible. Please help him out!

Jay Dee's avatarI Read Encyclopedias for Fun

The Iliad, Greece The Iliad, Greece

One of my challenges is to read a book from every country. But I have no idea where to start. What books are good to read? I’ve mostly read books from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and a handful from other countries like Japan and Greece. I want to know what is out there. It’s difficult to choose. So, I need your help. I need a lot of people’s help.

Here’s what I propose. It’s very simple. All you need to do is leave a comment stating which country you’re from and which book you’d recommend from your country. It could be a book that defines literature in your country, or it could be a book that’s your favourite. Anything is fine, as long as you’d recommend it.

Second, and this is important, I’m asking you to share this post with your friends and family…

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Thank you to the authors who participated in our poetry and prose series during 2015

I am so glad that to have found Silver Birch Press in 2015! I am so pleased to have been part of five of these series:
All About My Name
My Perfect Vacation
My Sweet Word
When I Hear That Song
Me, During the Holidays

What will 2016 bring? It will be exciting to experience it!

silverbirchpress's avatarSilver Birch Press

thank you
During 2015, the Silver Birch Press blog featured 10 poetry and prose series. Many thanks to all who participated. All told, our 2015 writing prompts generated 965 poems and stories — the vast majority written specifically for our series. Amazing!

IAM WAITING Poetry Series (Dec. 1, 2014 – Jan. 31, 2015): 137 participants

WHERE I LIVE Poetry & Photography Series(Feb. 1 – March 31, 2015): 132 participants

ME, AS A CHILD Poetry Series (April 1 – May 31, 2015): 175 participants

ALL ABOUT MY NAME Poetry Series (June 1 – July 18, 2015): 160 participants

MY PERFECT VACATION Poetry & Prose Series (July 19 – Aug. 21, 2015): 71 participants

MY METAMORPHOSIS Poetry & Prose Series (Aug. 22 – Sept. 15, 2015): 52 participants

MY SWEET WORD Poetry & Prose Series(Sept. 16 – Oct. 31, 2015): 98 participants

WHEN I HEAR THAT SONG Poetry & Prose Series

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Resolutions, goals, and plans

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts over the last few days with people stating their New Year’s resolutions. I admit that I am not a New Year’s resolution person. If I need to make a change, I prefer to start when the need arises.

I’m not especially wedded to January first as a date. Which reminds me that I wrote a poem about it…

Some people chose to list goals rather than resolutions, but even that sounds too cut-and-dried to me.

Jay Dee, at the end of this Authors Answer post, asks what are our plans for 2016.

Plans are something I can get behind. Plans to me are more dynamic and able to be adjusted or revised as needed. Plans don’t have an expiration date.

My writing plan is to put together my first poetry collection.

Those of you who followed my saga of the Mass MoCA/Tupelo Press residency/workshop know that I had hoped returning to my home locale in its new phase of life would spawn a chapbook. Midway though the residency week, I realized that it needed to be a collection rather than a chapbook.

I have a provisional title.

A schema for organizing the sections of the collection.

And some poems that I have already written that will fit into the collection. Others are drafted but need revisions, workshopping, and more revision. Others are still barely ideas and there may be still others that become necessary to write to fill in gaps in the timeline or to balance the sections.

I am planning on marshaling my local resources, Sappho’s Circle and the Bunn Hill Poets, for help with workshopping individual poems. As I get further along in the process, I will probably afflict commandeer invite several writer-poet friends to critique a section or the whole collection. Other people are so much better at pointing out what doesn’t make sense or what is out of order than I am when I am so close to it.

I am ecstatic that our residency group, the Boiler House Poets, will have a reunion this fall. I definitely plan to enlist their help, although I’m not sure in what capacity. It will depend on where I am in the process in the fall. I may need more workshopping help, or organizational assistance, or help navigating the submission process, or may need some more art poems to balance the final section so that I would be generating new poems during the residency that would need feedback.

To me, that is part of the beauty of a plan. It can change and grow as needs dictate.

I know that many people would say that plans need to be written out with checkboxes and timelines and deadlines or things won’t get done.

I do understand that logic, but I can’t force myself – or my poetry – into that kind of straitjacket.

My life experience has featured too many unexpected events to carve any plan in stone.

Too many things can happen.

Too many things have happened.

I am confident that I will assemble this manuscript, but it doesn’t feel safe to me to say it is a 2016 goal or worse – shudder – resolution. It is a plan with roots in 2015 which will grow in 2016.

The fruit will ripen when the time is right. Whatever number gets attached to that date is not mine to say.

It’s not in the plan.
*****
Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out more about it here:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/04/just-jot-it-january-4th-dachshund/

JJJ 2016

 

Catching up on the twelve days of Christmas

Today, Catholics celebrate Epiphany, commemorating the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus. Technically, it should be celebrated on Jan. 6th, bringing to a close the famed twelve days of Christmas, but Epiphany gets moved to a Sunday in the modern liturgical calendar. Also, the liturgical season of Christmas extends through the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord the following Sunday.  (Can you tell I spent many years serving in liturgical and music ministry?)

I posted about our Christmas Eve and Day, but haven’t filled in much of the rest of our Christmas observance.  We do try as much as possible to observe Advent as a time of waiting and preparation, even though culturally in the US, most of December is packed with Christmas festivities which end on Christmas Day rather than begin there.

One of the things that helps us extend our celebration of Christmas is the arrival of my sisters and their families after Christmas. This year, they arrived on Dec. 26. We met at my parents’ apartment for food, fun, Christmas cookies, and gift exchange that afternoon and evening, followed by a big dinner at our house on the 27th.

We inherited the making of family dinners when my parents first moved to an apartment about ten years ago. Part of the inheritance came in the form of the electric rotisserie that I remember from my childhood, on which we made a traditional rolled beef rib roast. We served mashed potatoes, gravy, popovers, rutabaga which my parents prepared, baked onions, Aussie-style bread which our son-in-law made, and fall vegetable chili, which is made with carrots, parsnips, sweet potato, onion, tomato, and red and white kidney beans.

For dessert, we had four pies:  apple, pumpkin, apple blackberry, and cranberry meringue, an addition to our pie repertoire made by our older daughter and her husband. Four pies may seem like a lot for fourteen people, but we always want to have some left over for breakfast the next morning!

Unfortunately, work schedules and threatening weather intervened and both sisters and family had to return home on the 28th. That left us two days with our older daughter E and son-in-law L before they had to fly home to Honolulu. We went out to lunch at a couple of our favorite local eateries, spent time with the grandparents, and enjoyed quiet times at home.

On the morning of the 29th, we were all up at 4 AM to get ready to bring E and L to the airport for a 6 AM flight to Newark and then on to Honolulu. We wished they could have stayed longer, but were very grateful to have them with us for a week.

I did write about our (sedate) New Year’s Eve and Day, although I did have the excitement of a new poem coming out on Silver Birch Press.

Epiphany is traditionally the day that we take down our Christmas tree, although we were late putting it up this year and it isn’t dropping needles, so maybe we will wait until next weekend. B returns to work on Monday and next week’s calendar is filled with appointments, so it is back to reality, or at least what passes for routine, tomorrow.
*****
This post is part of Linda’s JusJoJan initiative. Join us! Read more about it here:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/03/just-jot-it-january-3rd-frozen/

JJJ 2016

 

SoCS: hitting the pause button

It’s been a busy couple of months. Ummmm…maybe more than a couple. OK – 2015 was a busy year.

This weekend, I just want to hit the pause button and rest. Not worry about planning anything. Being anywhere.

Just be.

Soon enough, it will be Monday morning. My husband’s 6 AM conference call with his colleagues in India will be back on. A lot of other obligations will be back on the calendar. I know. I spent a good chunk of yesterday copying dates onto a 2016 calendar. I’m still old-fashioned enough to keep a paper calendar rather than an electronic one. Well, two paper calendars. One on the dining room side table near the phone. Yes, landline. Still have one of those, too. The other a pocket calendar in my purse.

All those obligations waiting for my attention, starting Monday, January 4th.

But this weekend, a pause to catch a few more moments of unstructured time with B and T. Maybe a nap. Or a fire in the fireplace. Some hot cocoa with the last of the Christmas cookies.

Who knows?

Just being.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “pause/paws.”  Join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/01/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-jan-216/

SoCS badge 2015

http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/02/just-jot-it-january-2nd-pausepaws-socs/

JJJ 2016

Welcome, 2016!

Happy New Year, everyone! We began our celebration toasting at midnight GMT, also known as 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, as I write about in my new poem on Silver Birch Press. We drank the very bottle of sparkling apple cranberry juice that I used in the photo, along with the wine glasses pictured. I did use some poetic license in the poem, as we do still have daughter T here celebrating with us this year.

I woke up early this morning with part of the middle of a poem for the collection I am working on this year swirling about in my head, so I got up to  type it into google docs before I lost it. I’m hoping it is a good omen for my poetic work this year to start January first by drafting new work for my first ever collection.

Later this morning, we will head up to GSV, the senior community where our elder generation live, to pick up Nana for 10 AM Mass. January 1st is a holy day in the Catholic Church, dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. After church, we will have brunch at GSV with Nana, Paco, Grandma, and Grandma’s neighbor Ann.

There aren’t plans for the rest of the day, although I expect it will be low-key. As you can see, we are not the wild and crazy types!

I wish everyone the gifts of peace, joy, and contentment in 2016!
*****
This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Visit this link for more info:  http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/01/just-jot-it-january-1st-persnickety/
JJJ 2016

Eastern Standard, poem by Joanne Corey (ME, DURING THE HOLIDAYS Poetry and Prose Series)

I am pleased to announce that my New Year’s Eve poem “Eastern Standard” is part of the “Me, During the Holidays” series on Silver Birch Press.

Not wanting to miss an opportunity to promote the Boiler House Poets’ video, there is a link to it in my bio, as well as a link to the SBP publication of “Lessons from Mahler.”

Best wishes to everyone for a wonderful 2016!

Peace,
Joanne

silverbirchpress's avatarSilver Birch Press

CoreyEastern Standard
by Joanne Corey

As the third millennium turned,
our family toasted with sparkling cider
at midnight Greenwich Mean Time,
seven in the evening for us,
in deference to daughters’ bedtimes.

With our children grown, the two
of us honor that tradition,
clink glasses, savor the past,
sip, hope for the future,
in evening dark as midnight.

PHOTO: Bubbly (fruit juice) and glasses ready for 2016.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As the year 2000 began, midnight celebrations across the world were broadcast live on television. Realizing that the top of the hour was always midnight somewhere, we decided that we would celebrate at midnight GMT, so that we could all observe our usual bedtimes. We still love this quiet way to celebrate the new year.

corey1ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joanne Corey lives and writes in Vestal, New York, where she is active with the Binghamton Poetry Project, Sappho’s Circle, and the…

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