Tag: Joanne Corey

Gingerbread Poem on Silver Birch Press!

It’s no secret that submitting poetry for publication is mostly an exercise in rejection, but this week is a time to share some successes. Yesterday, I posted about the publication of three poems in Emulate. Today, I’m happy to share that Silver Birch Press has published my poem “My husband and daughters make Christmas gingerbread” as part of their SPICES & SEASONINGS Series! Many thanks to Melanie and the Silver Birch Press team for including me in this several-months-long-and-counting series!

I submitted to the series back in late August and received the acceptance notification in early September, but assumed, correctly, that they would hold publication until Christmas-cookie-baking season. It’s fun and festive to have it appear now. (Photo is some of our gingerbread from 2010.)

This poem started with a prompt from Heather Dorn in December, 2015, when she was facilitating a women’s poetry workshop called Sappho’s Circle. The middle “action” section of the poem descends from that time. When the Silver Birch Press call for submissions came in this summer, calling for writing about a specific spice or seasoning, I immediately thought of that poem and set about revising it to “spice it up.”

B and I have often discussed how it is the amount of clove in these cookies that distinguishes them so that became the focus of the new opening and closing sections. I was also able to workshop the poem with my fellow Grapevine Poets before submitting to Silver Birch Press.

As it happens, Silver Birch published the poem on their site yesterday, so I was able to share it via social media then, while waiting to do the blog post today, given that I had already posted about the poems in Emulate yesterday and wanted to spread the poetic good news reporting out a bit here at Top of JC’s Mind.

Because of that, I’ve already had a number of comments on Facebook about the poem. One from my college roommate was especially touching, as she referenced her “unexpected joy” at seeing her mother’s words in the cookbook inscription in my poem. My eyes welled with tears, remembering our moms, both of whom died a few years ago.

In workshopping this poem, there was discussion about how much detail to leave in the poem and how much to cut. There is always a tension in revision on this point and I admire poets who can choose just the right detail to impact their audience. I tend to be guilty of too much detail, which sometimes leads to comments of “why should I care?” about some detail or other. I’m grateful, though, that I chose to leave that particular detail in this poem.

Granted, no other reader may have found that specific moment of joy from this poem, but, perhaps, there is another detail that struck them, that reminded them of family or baking or Christmas tradition. It’s not something that I’m likely to ever know.

This poem has been described to me as “lovely” and “charming.” I realize that others would term it overly sentimental or unsophisticated.

Perhaps, it is all of those things.

I do know, though, that it is authentic to who I am as a poet and as a person. I think – or, at least, I hope – that comes through to those who encounter my work.

As always, your comments are welcome, either here, on Facebook, or at the Silver Birch Press post.

Wishing you all a delicious treat that suits your taste!

Three Poems in Emulate Magazine!

I’m pleased to share the online version of Emulate Magazine Fall 2023 (Volume 5, Issue 1), which includes three of my MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts) ekphrastic poems. Many thanks to the Emulate Magazine team at Smith College for including my work in this issue! Smith is my alma mater, so being chosen for this publication is particularly close to my heart.

The theme of the issue is “Metamorphosis.” I was excited to discover that the editorial team had chosen my poem, “Time/Rate/Distance,” to open the issue! This poem is based on Richard Nonas’s Cut Back Through (for Bjorn), which is a long-term outdoor installation on the MASS MoCA grounds. It is comprised of three large granite chairs and five footstools. I suppose “Time/Rate/Distance” could be considered an American sonnet, because it has 14 lines, with a turn between lines 8 and 9, like an Italian sonnet. (Just throwing that comment in to address the common criticism that I don’t write enough in received Western forms, like sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas.)

“I Must Speak My Poem” (page 11) is based on Stephen Vitiello’s sound installation All Those Vanished Engines, housed in the Boiler House at MASS MoCA. My beloved Boiler House Poets Collective recorded our first reading there and we always visit when we are back for our reunion residencies. I was disappointed this year that we weren’t able to climb all the way to the rooftop, which offers a spectacular view of North Adams and the surrounding hills.

“Translation” (page 26) is a haiku based on the works of Justin Favela, whose pieces translating landscape paintings by José María Velasco using the paper and glue techniques of piñata art were part of the MASS MoCA Kissing Through a Curtain exhibition (2020-2021). I especially love that this poem appears on the page with a striking photograph by Avery Maltz.

All three of these poems are part of my chapbook manuscript of ekphrastic poems based on current and past exhibitions at MASS MoCA. Two of them are also included in my full-length manuscript centered on the North Adams area. I will, of course, add Emulate Magazine to my list of acknowledgements and my author page, joannecorey.com.

Be sure to check out this issue of Emulate Magazine! It is chock-full of poetry, prose, and images, all centered on metamorphosis and the myriad ways it manifests.

Kelsay authors at MASS MoCA

One of the fun things that happened during the Boiler House Poets Collective (BHPC) annual workshop at The Studios at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) this year was the chance for poets Mary Beth Hines, Jessica Dubey, and I to celebrate our books, all published by Kelsay Books.

I’m pleased to share the December post from the Kelsay Books blog that features the three of us on our MASS MoCA adventures. While Jessica and I live near one another and are long-time members of the Grapevine Poets and BHPC, this was our first time meeting Mary Beth. Although Mary Beth, as a Massachusite, was already familiar with MASS MoCA, we were thrilled to welcome her to BHPC and look forward to her return next fall for our 2024 reunion residency.

Mary Beth was the first of us to publish with Kelsay. Her debut collection, Winter at a Summer House, was published in November, 2021. Jessica’s second chapbook, All Those Years Underwater, followed in November, 2022. (Jessica’s first chapbook, For Dear Life, had been published by Finishing Line Press in May, 2022.) My first chapbook, Hearts, appeared in May, 2023.

I love this photo of us taken by fellow BHPC member Wendy Stewart! Wendy managed to catch not only, from left to right, me, Mary Beth, and Jessica, with our books and smiles but also a reflection of part of Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic, the iconic art installation at the main entrance to MASS MoCA. Commonly referred to as “the upside-down trees,” the maples had graced the courtyard since April 1999, with the trees replaced occasionally so that they could re-orient themselves and spread their roots. The image of the upside-down tree had come to symbolize MASS MoCA and was featured on a number of items in the gift shop.

As I was heading home from our residency, I was shocked to read that Tree Logic was ending its almost 25 years on exhibit in just a few days. The final trees are transplanted on the MASS MoCA campus along the Speedway. I’ll make sure to visit them next October when BHPC is again in residence, or, perhaps, I will make it back to the Museum next May for the 25th anniversary celebration.

I know the trees will be reaching for the light in their new orientation, their roots expanding to anchor them to the site of so much change over the decades. Over time, they will straighten, although they will always bear some remembrance of their time of inversion.

One-Liner Wednesday: 100 views

Today’s notification from WordPress: “Congratulations! Your site, Joanne Corey, passed 100 all-time views.” This is my author site and domain name that I finally set up in honor of the release of my first chapbook and the tenth anniversary of Top of JC’s Mind. I suppose it shouldn’t have taken almost two months to get 100 views, but, hey, not bad for a poet. 😉

This super-sized One-Liner Wednesday post is part of a series spearheaded by Linda Hill, author and blogger at Life in Progress. Click the link for a lovely autumnal photo and for instructions on how to join in the #1linerWeds fun!

A poem for Banned Books Week

In honor of Banned Books Week, I’m sharing my poem “The Banned Bookmobile” which was first published in the Fall-Winter 2022 issue of Rat’s Ass Review.

THE BANNED BOOKMOBILE by Joanne Corey
 
Do you need a special license to drive
a bus of books? Children
 
are more fragile; books,
more combustible.
 
Children’s minds need fire,
need those books to start a blaze.
 
How else to know that a pair of penguin
dads can raise a chick?
 
That witches and wizards can be evil
or good or somewhere in the flawed between?
 
That even the bluest eye cannot
confer beauty and love?
 
That it’s a sin to kill
a mockingbird?


(You can read a bit of backstory for this poem in my blog post here.)

BHPC ’23 reading at The Bear & Bee!

Yesterday morning, the 2023 members of the Boiler House Poets Collective did a reading at The Bear & Bee Bookshop in North Adams, Massachusetts.

It was a lot of fun! We had a mix of family and friends, folks from the community, members of the writers’ group that meets at the Bear & Bee, even someone who came in after a yoga class at the studio next door.

I acted as emcee. We presented in reverse alphabetical order: Wendy Stewart. Eva Schegulla, Kyle Laws (who was unable to attend in person, so I read her poems), Hope Jordan, Mary Beth Hines, Nancy Edelstein (who presented a video of her artwork in relationship with light), Jessica Dubey, Merrill Douglas, Jessica Bane Robert, and me, Joanne Corey. Okay, I broke with the reverse alphabetical order so I could go last and moderate for questions and answers. It wound up that there were no questions, so my job was easy.

Several of us, including me, chose work that deals with the North Adams area. Several chose to incorporate the themes of light and darkness, which ties into Nancy’s work and video and which has been a theme for us this year during our residency. It was a joy to hear so many voices and perspectives concentrated in a short amount of time.

Already making plans for next year, so stay tuned!

New Poem in Mania Magazine!

Yesterday, the Boiler House Poets Collective began their annual workshop-in-residence with The Studios at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) In North Adams.

Yesterday, my new poem “drinks” appeared in Issue Two of Mania Magazine. Mania Magazine is “a small, independent literary magazine dedicated to your 3AM works!”

It’s ironic that it came out on the opening day of our residency because this poem was written during the 2015 residency with Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press at The Studios, only a few weeks after residencies began, that gave birth to the BHPC. (Anyone who is curious can read my blog posts about that experience.) The short version is that I was in waaaaaaaay over my head, and was not sleeping well and overwhelmed most of the time. I did not write this poem at 3 AM but my brain was definitely in that mode, resulting in a somewhat atypical poem for me. I’ve sent it out a few times over the years to journals that had a more expermimental or quirky bent but it has never been picked up until Mania arrived on the scene.

This is only their second issue and I’m so pleased to be included. There’s prose, poetry, art and photography – and you can read and enjoy at any time of the day or night.

Even 3 AM…

reflections on ten years of blogging

As I promised in this post announcing the creation of joannecorey.com, here are some reflections on ten years of blogging here as Top of JC’s Mind – a little later than planned, but what else is new?

Ten-ish years ago, I was just starting to write poetry as a serious pursuit and writing a lot of commentary on fracking and related topics, which I sometimes cross-posted to Facebook. I also posted on Facebook articles and comments on a wide range of current issues. Several friends suggested that I start a blog and, as preserved for posterity in my first post, I fell into it on September 13, 2013.

Of course, as in so many other things I’ve chosen or been compelled to do, I didn’t really know what I was doing. [Embarking on projects for which I do not have sufficient training/background is somewhat of a life theme with me. I’m forever grateful to Smith College for grounding me in the liberal arts and schooling me in how to think critically and creatively, so that I’ve been able to branch out into different activities without making a total hash of it.] I had planned for Top of JC’s Mind to be an eclectic blog, hence the tagline “eclectic like me.”

While I have found a number of other blogs that deal with anything/everything, it’s usually recommended for blogs to have a theme, like food or music or travel. It’s also recommended to have a set publication schedule, every Monday and Thursday, for example. It’s strongly encouraged to incorporate images into all your posts.

So, I flew in the face of all that advice, not because it isn’t good advice, but because it didn’t work for me. Sticking to one topic is much too confining. My personal schedule, if you can even apply that term, has always been unpredictable and became more so as I dealt with multi-generational caregiving. My nod to regular posting has been to often, though not always, participate in the series from Linda G. Hill’s Life in progress blog, One-Liner Wednesdays and Stream of Consciousness Saturday. I’ve also participated in her initiative, Just Jot it January, in which we are challenged to post every day for the month. My One-Liner Wednesday and Stream of Consciousness Saturday posts are accessible through entries in the main menu.

I did initiate a series of my own, JC’s Confessions, loosely modeled after a recurring segment in the early years of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in which Stephen “confessed” to things that, while not really sins, he felt badly about. Of course, Stephen is humorous and I am not. A link to JC’s Confessions is also in my main menu.

I also started a series How Does JC’s Mind Work? but it only has two entries so far. It’s inspired by the slow-dawning realization that my mind works in some atypical ways, as an INFJ who is also an HSP. I’ve only recently started to learn more about these categorizations and it’s helped to explain a lot of things that were puzzling to me. For example, studies have shown that brains like mine are wired differently and process thoughts, emotions, stimuli, etc. differently than the majority of people. I think we all tend to default to the position that others’ brains and minds operate the same way ours does; I know that I tended to do so. I do find myself sometimes explaining to people what I’m thinking or feeling because I’m often misinterpreted and then get in trouble with people based on their perceptions rather than my reality. This series is also a place for me to talk about personal history and influences that shaped who I am today. And, yes, I really should get back to this series, at some point..

One of the things that I intended to do was to share poetry, which I do, although seldom with poems that aren’t already published elsewhere. What I didn’t realize when I started Top of JC’s Mind is that, for many journals and publishers, even a personal blog post with a handful of views is disqualifying. I usually only post original work that I don’t foresee being able to publish in a journal, such as current event poems that have been rejected by the couple of venues I know that publish such things or ekphrastic poems that I aren’t chosen in response to The Ekphrastic Review‘s Writing Challenge Series.

What I didn’t foresee was how much I would post about the process of writing poetry and learning about writing poetry. I didn’t know that I would be part of a workshop-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams with the Boiler House Poets Collective. Or that I would be publishing in anthologies with the Binghamton Poetry Project. I certainly had no clue that I would eventually publish my first chapbook, Hearts.

I also didn’t realize how much I would write about my family. For their privacy, I chose to refer to them by initials or nicknames, so only people who know us in real life can easily find them. Ten years ago, I didn’t know the paths that the final years of my parents and mother-in-law would take or that I would have two granddaughters who would be living across an ocean from me.

I certainly didn’t know that I would post extensively about a pandemic. I’m continuing to add an occasional COVID-19 post. (I’m getting my updated vaccine on Monday, so another post will be coming.) One of the local historical societies decided to keep an archive of how the pandemic affected daily life in our area and I’m proud that they chose to include print-outs of my COVID-19 posts in that collection. Maybe, a hundred years from now, someone will stumble across them while doing research…

I do weigh in on current events, which are often disconcerting. I’ve written about gun violence and hatefulness in US society because of their sad, overwhelming prevalence. I’ve written quite a lot about government and the bewildering lack of attention to the Constitutional call to “promote the general welfare.” I mourn over the continuation of racism, sexism, bigotry, intolerance, and hatefulness that are so much in evidence and seem to be worsening rather than lessening. I try to show my values of love, respect, inclusion, and care for others and the world. I strive to express my authentic self here at Top of JC’s Mind and take care to be factually correct.

I welcome comments to my posts and do my best to respond. I will engage in respectful debate with those who disagree with me. It doesn’t happen often but I have had instances where I’ve had to delete or edit a comment. This is my platform and I will not have it used to spread misinformation or hatefulness. (I also don’t allow coarse language. My inability to swear or engage in vulgarity is a bit of a running joke among my poetry circles. Somewhere in the back of my head is a voice from my childhood saying, “What! Were you raised in a barn?”)

One of the things that bloggers are supposed to do is amass readers and followers. It’s suggested that a blogger spends a third of their time reading others’ blogs, a third writing posts, and a third writing comments on others’ blogs and responding on their own. That way, you connect with others in the blogging community and get noticed by more bloggers and readers. I really did try to do that early on but, as demands on my personal time grew, I found I only had time to write posts and tend to their comments, with occasional frenzied bouts of reading. Consequently, I don’t have tons of views and followers.

Of course, bloggers are also supposed to track stats. WordPress has a handy page to do this – and I don’t usually – but I will put my all-time stats in this post for the sake of posterity. Ten years of Top of JC’s Mind has ammased:
1,839 posts
7,107 comments
62,805 visits
34, 983 unique visitors
1,950 subscribers/followers

The subscriber/follower number is somewhat inflated. It includes people who have followed me through WordPress, liked my Top of JC’s Mind Facebook page, signed up to receive posts by email, and followed me through Twitter (now X and no longer available for automatic sharing through WordPress.) This means that some individuals are counted more than once. A few that I know of are now deceased. Many of the followers through WordPress are folks who found their way to one of my posts, hit follow, and never visited again. I do have a small core of readers who visit frequently and comment often, which I appreciate so much. You know who you are! I can’t really tell you how many readers I have for a typical post because I can only track site visits; I have no way of knowing how many people read posts sent via email.

I do, though, want to thank everyone who has ever visited Top of JC’s Mind, liked a post, commented, followed, or subscribed. While the process of writing helps to clarify my thoughts, writing for others challenges me to express those thoughts in a cogent way. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss different topics and share thoughts, experiences, and feelings with whoever happens to drop into my tiny sliver of the blogosphere.

I try to keep growing as a blogger. I’m being forced to trying to improve my use of images in order to crosspost to Instagram, which requires an image. (But, seriously, Instagram! Why do you insist on .jpgs only? Why not allow .png and .webp? And why do you have this thing with squares?) Instagram is the reason that so many of my posts lately, including this one, have my photo at the top. I’m trying to decide if I should get a new headshot taken of my post-cataract surgery, post-Invisalign self but I’ve used this photo that spouse B took of me to accompany this poem for so long that I’m loathe to replace it.

So, will I blog here for another ten years? I can’t guarantee, but I do have hope. I hope at least a few of you will stay tuned and journey with me.

Peace,
Joanne Corey of Top of JC’s Mind

One-Liner Wednesday: Ten!

To celebrate today’s tenth anniversary of Top of JC’s Mind, I’ve finally upgraded to having my own domain, joannecorey.com, so you can read Top of JC’s Mind selected from the menu there or, as always, at topofjcsmind.wordpress.com.

This shameless bit of self-promotion brought to you as part of Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2023/09/13/one-liner-wednesday-nostalgia/

New domain!

Tomorrow will be the tenth anniversary of Top of JC’s Mind!

To celebrate, I’ve (finally) upgraded my plan and have my own domain address, joannecorey.com. There is a link to Top of JC’s Mind in the main menu and topofjcsmind.wordpress.com will remain active as the blog address indefinitely.

Things are super simple at the moment. I’m using the same Twenty Sixteen theme but without the side bars, widgets, and banners, at least to start. It’s been exciting enough just to get the site up and running this afternoon!

I’ve decided to keep the Author Page in the menu for Top of JC’s Mind, at least for now. Most of the content on joannecorey.com is taken from that page, although divvied up into more reasonable chunks across three pages. Now, though, I can claim to have an author site.

You all can probably guess what my One-Liner Wednesday will be about tomorrow, although I hope to also write a more substantive post about making it through ten years of blogging later in the week.

Enjoy!