I’ve had a major uptick in my fatigue level so I haven’t been able to manage writing the couple dozen of posts that I wish I had over the last few weeks, but my health care team is working on a new batch of tests, a med change, and probably an additional diagnosis that may eventually lead to improvement, so stay tuned…
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/06/10/one-liner-wednesday-you-know-youre-tired/
For the past several years, the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at my alma mater, Smith College, has offered a Blackout Poetry Project to the Smith community, including alums. In the blackout poetry style, one takes a page of pre-existing text and crosses out words or letters to create a poem. The pages are then sometimes embellished with color or other visual art elements. I have participated in prior years, such as the year when the theme was Emily Dashes, using the poems of Emily Dickinson.
This year’s theme is Monster Mash, creating blackout poetry using pages from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. As you can imagine, the work is quite dark in tone, so I decided to take page 22, which was sent to me from the Center, and transform it into a brighter message.
As it may be difficult to read from the photo, the words I chose to highlight are:
arouse a multitude
excite good people
restore life
a new promise
My visual artist friends will, I’m sure, forgive my rudimentary collage but I felt that we are all in need of a bit of sunshine today.
As I wrote here, I was unable to attend the Write Out Loud ’26 event at the Fenimore Art Museum near Cooperstown, NY, last month, but I’m happy to share the newly released recording.
My poem “Nor’easter Numbers” is first on the program, read wonderfully by the fabulous Sharon Rankins-Burd. If you watch the video on YouTube and click on “more,” you can see the program and timings laid out so you can easily navigate to particular pieces. Enjoy! As always, feel free to comment.
Yesterday, WordPress told me that Top of JC’s Mind/joannecorey.com has passed 100,000 views!
That’s cool!
I have to remind myself that there are also additional views of my posts because some people read my blog via email and don’t visit the site directly, so would not be counted.
Perhaps, those counterbalance the views that result from random bots. Every once in a while, I have a day where I get the message that “my stats are booming.” Those days seldom result in comments or likes, though, so it’s likely they are bots roaming around WordPress. The exception was April 17 when I suddenly got 35 new subscribers, although, presumably they are mostly bots, too.
The main factor in getting to 100,000 views is that I’ve been around since September, 2013. I’ve had a long time to accumulate views. Granted, some bloggers would be disappointed if they weren’t getting 100,000 views per month/week/day(!), but, fortunately, I’m in this for the sake of sharing and chronicling and communicating rather than as a moneymaker so I can just be grateful rather than anxious about stats.
So, thank you to all my past and current visitors!
Even the bots, as long as they are not being destructive…
Here in the United States, April is observed as National Poetry Month. While my writing and activities are constrained by my health, it was my privilege to be involved with a couple of poetry events this month.
I was able to read a couple of my poems as part of the Tioga Arts Council‘s Poetry Out Loud event. Area poets gathered to read poems, their own or others’. I especially loved hearing from some of my friends of the Grapevine Poets and from Dante Di Stefano, whose spouse is director of the Tioga Arts Council. The amazing thing about the reading was that there were a number of participants who had never before done a reading or even attended one. We also had a wide range of work read, including a poem in Bengali which was a combination of singing and speaking.
For the third consecutive year, one of my poems was accepted to the Write Out Loud event at the Fenimore Art Museum near Cooperstown, NY. The performance was the evening before the Madrigal Choir of Binghamton’s spring concert and I knew I would not have energy to sing dress rehearsal, scoot to Cooperstown for the evening, and sing an afternoon concert the next day, so I happily ceded reading duties to Sharon Rankins-Burd, who read my poem “The Bridge” so admirably last year. This year, my poem “Nor’Easter Numbers” was the first poem on the program. I’m looking forward to the recording of the reading becoming available. I’ll post when it is! Update: the recording is now available here.
How did you celebrate poetry this month?
Last Sunday, I sang a concert of music from the Baltic region with the Madrigal Choir of Binghamton under the direction of John M. Vaida.
It was a great experience for us and for our audience. We got to perform pieces by composers that were new to most of us. I added languages to my personal list of sung texts, Swedish and Estonian. We also welcomed the Fair Winds Quintet as our guests, made possible by a grant from the United Cultural Fund of the Broome County Arts Council. They played a set before the sung concert and another to begin the second half of the program after intermission. It was wonderful to have these talented local artists join us for the concert.
One of my favorite pieces on the program was “Cantate Domino”, a setting of part of Psalm 98 by the Lithunian composer Vytautas Miškinis. Another highlight was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Bogoroditse Devo” from his All-Night Vigil. I had first sung this under the direction of Dr. Bruce Borton with the University Chorus. Bruce had prepared a new edition of the Vigil for us to use and we later sang this movement in later programs, so it always reminds me of him. Bruce also became the second artistic director of the Madrigal Choir a few years before his retirement from Binghamton University. After the pandemic shutdown and the end of University Chorus, Bruce welcomed me to Madrigal Choir. Shortly after I joined, Bruce fell ill. I wrote about the last concert he conducted with Madrigal Choir here and about singing at his funeral and Madrigal Choir tribute here. This Rachmoninoff piece was part of a concert dedicated to Bruce at the University. I was grateful for the opportunity to sing it again, especially at Trinity Episcopal Church where Bruce had sung and volunteered for many years as a congregant.
I particularly loved the final piece of the program, a newly written hymn by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, set to the tune “Finlandia” by Jean Sibelius. Rev. Gillette is a local Presbyterian pastor and hymnist with over 500 hymns to her credit. This poem, “O God of Love, This Is a Time of Turning”, was written in January, 2026, after speaking with a seminary friend serving in Minneapolis. We printed the words in the program and invited the audience to join us in singing – and they did!
We sang, “May we stand firm for truth and peace and justice;
May we leave fear and hatred far behind.”
May it be so.
Ellen Morris Prewitt‘s new novel, When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women, launches today, so get your copy of what promises to be an imaginative, fun read!
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/04/01/one-liner-wednesday-a-cure/
Silver Birch Press has just published my tanka, “Natives“, as part of their BUGS & INSECTS series! Many thanks to Melanie and SBP for including me in this months-long series!
I really appreciate that SBP includes author notes. Here, it’s a chance to talk a bit about native plants and pollinators.
Please feel free to comment here or on the post itself, if you are so moved. Also, you can click around and read some of the diverse work centered around bugs and insects in this series or re-visit past series. I’ve loved participating in a number of Silver Birch Press prompt series over the past several years and hope to submit to more in the future.
I often think of my life in chapters.
They aren’t sequential or in blocks of time, though.
It’s more that they are organized topically.
For example, in my volunteer life, there are chapters around church, social justice advocacy, environmental causes, and school curriculum and committees when I was a parent.
In music, there is the church music and organ chapter, composition, and choral music, starting in high school, then Smith College both as a student and alum, decades with University Chorus at SUNY-Binghamton, and now with the Madrigal Choir of Binghamton.
In my personal life, the chapters are very long. Some as a daughter, granddaughter, and sister are life-long. Even though my parents and grandparents have all passed away, being a daughter and granddaughter is forever, as is being a sister.
Another long chapter which is ongoing is with my spouse B, who I met early in high school. We will celebrate our 44th anniversary later this year. I think that part of the reason we are who we are at this point is that we were able to grow and change together over all this time.
And then, there is my writing life, with chapters for school, what I think of as utilitarian writing like doing commentary, blogging, and poetry.
Two chapters that remain close to my heart are as a mom and, for the last 8 and a half years, a grandmother. Those chapters are the most forward-looking. I don’t think of my daughters’ and granddaughters’ stories as sequels to mine because they are their own authors but I am honored to be a chapter in their own books of life.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “chapter.” Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/02/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-7-2026/
Linda and the Just Jot It January blogging community kindly provide daily prompts to help people generate posts.
And I often go off and do my own thing…
Today, though, the prompt is “prompt” so I’m going with it.
I had hoped to write a post in my occasional JC’s Confessions series but that will take a lot of brainpower that I don’t have today. I’ve had a couple of medical appointments this week that need follow-up of various kinds and I’m struggling with some pain issues, not helped by the very cold weather we are having this week.
So, thank you, Linda and everyone, for the prompt today.
Write on!
*****
To find out more about how to join Just Jot It January, visit here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/01/29/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-29th-2026/
Joanne Corey 