Good Morning Sunday!

I must have a sun overdose. I've had all kinds of energy. I've figured out how to fix the WordPress webzine for my professional organization but think I'll still hire someone else to do it. I found a WP template I like and now I want to start another blog for pete's sake, just to use the new template.

I've been looking at the letters and poetry files from the 80s and 90s and converting the ancient WordPerfect files over to Word docs. I wish I could convert them all at once like I did with the documents I used for my dissertation but I can't find any software that recognizes this very old file format.  It's from one of the early WordPerfect versions from the 80s that I used on that old 286.  I'm using a WordPerfect 2002 to read the files.  I have to open each file in order to convert it so it forces me to read the files, something I've been putting off for years.

I also spent some time spiffing up my blogger blog and found an interesting new tool called Zemanta which suggests related content for your blog post.  It also uses something called common tagging which is a real semantic web effort aimed at creating unified content across the web. 

Today, we are having my final birthday party of the year--the poker crew is coming over--yay!  I'm going to get Ezell's Chicken for the party,  We will probably play poker here in the heat in the kitchen because that's what we do.  We are having the party so early because we have a Seattle Storm game to attend this evening.  Hopefully we will win this one and go 20/2. We are playing the Tulsa Shock so victory shouldn't be too hard.

Time to go get me some fried chicken!

I'm back!

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time. I was really, really tired after I finished my PhD and writing regularly fell off my to do list. Also just after I graduated, my 3 PC desktop computers that had seen me through the years of study and backup requirements just died. I left them dead. I was dead tired. I've decided not to purchase any new PCs for now but I recently started feeling like I had to get to the files on the disks. After a year and a half, it seemed like it was time for me to look at my files again. I bought some external HDD enclosures for the drives I took out of the dead PCs and plugged the old drives in. Then I plugged the enclosures into my last ever PC laptop. I mean it. This is my final PC. Today I finally found the disk that has most of my files, including the files from my old 286. My poetry, letters and journal entries from my twenties and thirties. That was what I was looking for! I want to read my past if it can be done because I have a hard time remembering anything. I think that's how I've always kept one foot in front of the other all these years. I don't look back much.

As I said, it's been about a year and a half since I graduated and I've been working full time again for the first time in years. I'm lucky that I love my work because it is very strange for me not to have a big goal on the horizon other than going to work every day.

I didn't go into academia. In spite of the shortage of nursing faculty, there were few local positions in the universities. Those available pay extremely low salaries. I don't know how people can afford to teach. If we want to solve the education crisis, we are simply going to have to pay more market rate salaries! I know, a lot of you say it's not about the money. My question to that is "what's it about then?" What other perverse rewards are demanded when people say they aren't there for the money? Money is a pretty clean medium of exchange--much cleaner than warm fuzzies that can require gratitude and adoration in return for labor. Such exchanges can lead to all kinds of emotional extortion of students or patients if one is in the health care field. I'll follow the money. It's honest.

Erykah Badu

Amy Tan writing from experience

Alice Munro Interview

hot Sunday

It's not that hot really, but I'm sweating. I took a lot of dog naps yesterday. No dog naps today but I'm not getting focused. I think working full time means you really have to rest on weekends.

Last week's report:

Xena's ear canals swelled shut and she got a bilateral yeast infection. She now gets two medicines twice a day in her ears and she doesn't like it that much. The hair on her ears is greasy and filthy from the medications.

I have on a dress that is not fit to feed the birds--Maxine our little plucker screams every time I go in the bird room wearing this thing.

Brocco escaped from his cage this morning somehow and flew at Eleni and bit her on the face. He's getting his wings clipped this week and may find himself going to live in a fancy exotic bird sanctuary!

I got sucked in to Farmtown on Face Book, then Farmville, then little farm something. What a time waster. I'm harvesting strawberries every 4 hours because I need the money to buy a farmhouse. I can't hardly believe it myself.

No new poems but I found out that my poems are probably postmodern poems. Amazing. I have been reading two anthologies of postmodern poems.

Until then.

Deer at Centrum Behind Dormitory

Mark Doty--poet & memoirist [at Centrum this summer]

First Book Poetry Contests--Submit in the Next Few Months

APR/Honickman First Book Prize | Guidelines

Colorado Prize for Poetry

Many Mountains Moving Press

Mississippi Review

Ohio State University Press

Walt Whitman Award

More Here!

Franz Wright

Franz Wright

A priest.  It figures.  Those who know me will understand.

Poets they said I should read:

1. Franz Wright
2. Mathew Dickman
3. Michael Dickman
4. Michael Burkhard
5. Joshua Beckman
6. Blue Mountain Poets
7. Robert Creeley

Poets I have read:

1. Jane Miller
2. Olga Broumas
3. Jorie Graham
4. Judy Grahn
5. Rita Mae Brown
6. W.S. Merwin
7. Galway Kinnell
8. Marvin Bell
9. Steven Jesse Bernstein
10. Dr. Seuss (does he count?)

Why is validation for your poems so important?

I have so enjoyed this week.  It's like a real vacation and I haven't thought about work or my responsibilities at all.  I wake up, get myself off to breakfast and then to my workshop with the fabulous Mark Doty and all the other chapbookers in my class.  There are 15 of us plus Mark.  I feel that I'm learning a great deal about how to read poems in a very warm, safe and loving environment, and in a fairly brief period of time.  Mark is a great teacher and I highly recommend him to anyone!

Each day we do either 2 or 3 students.  This means we go over each collection of poems for approximately 35 minutes.  We have all read all the poems prior to the workshop--almost 400 in total.  We are predominantly looking at the form of the chapbook, but we review individual poems at times.  Many of my classmates have already published a fair number of poems, chapbooks and even books, and all of them are very well read.  They have been especially kind to me because I haven't.  I feel out of my depth most of the time.  I get symbols, mood, tone etc., but I am not well read in poetry and do not have much to recommend.

I was the 3rd student to read--my classmates picked out two poems they wanted me to read.  They knew much more about the poems than I did, they had given them such a close reading, and in many cases several close readings.  They said things like quirky, creative, interior, funny, etc.  My cheeks were bursting to smile I was so happy.  This was pretty scary for me to do.  The poems have been put away for about 12-15 years due to tragedy and pain.

What I've Done this Past WEEK!

1. talked to my dear friend Tracey from ETSU days.
   
2. read about 500 poems for Centrum
3. gained about 4 pounds in one day due to birthday cake to die for by Margurite at work!
4. proofread the two papers to be published in ANS this fall from my dissertation!
5. wrote first draft of grant request for HITECH money
6. trained a new ARNP for the hospital
7. attended 14 meetings at work and didn't fall asleep.
8. started a new blog: Lisa Trigg's Poem Repository
9. loaded most of my poems to the new blog
10. reloaded the wordpress software for PR about 4 times before I got it to work.
11. learned a lot about my host/server and wordpress.
12. the new Thesis Theme is fantastic, and I will be using it for a while.
13. lost my content for my of Course Foucault, the autoethnography of my dissertation blog and will have to start over with it. Had to load it 4 times to get it to work.
    
14. did not buy a new computer. my better smarter half pointed out that I bought 3 new ones last year, so. I still feel like I need a new one!
    
15. made a new friend on FB who wants to deposit some poems in my new poem repository! Hello Paulinerose!
    
16. found denise's phone number and heard her voice on the voice mail
17. mailed regalia back to the graduation people.
    

In Preparation for Centrum

I have spent a quiet morning without television reading poems for the workshop. I'm about half way through a 1 inch binder of poems. When I get tired of that, I read my own poems aloud to reacquaint myself with them and to remember that young woman who wrote them. They are all about women. I don't know how I could have cared so much. Now I'm looking for lost poems on among the files I found from my first computer, the old 286! So far I've found several that I haven't seen in many years:

Benediction

Blank Pages in a Letter of Regret

Four Lebel Interchange

We Will Give the Names New Gods

I've also found a letter from my brother when he started college!

I'm missing some poems too. News From A Board, and one about a homecoming queen. I guess I'll have to dig out hard copies.

These poems are about women for the most part and a little juvenile! I did find some fiction I liked.

I've been looking for good self publishing software for an online chapbook. I just downloaded and will try the new Thesis Theme for Wordpress.

While reading the poems in my red chair I fell asleep and dreamed the poems were read on a game show and we competed for something I can't remember now. Maybe that's the point!

Hello Again

I've been sucked into the immediate gratification of Facebook & Twitter. Is that good for me? I plan to return to blogging. Am preparing for Centrum Writer's Workshop with Mark Doty. I'm reading poems from my classmates and I never realized how many poems I'd be reading for this event! It's kinda fun but having no pometry background I don't know what to say about most of them!

Life's for Sharing

Saturday Chores

I spent all day in my office cleaning out the detritis of the dissertation.  There was also quite a bit of dust still remaining from the bathroom remodel.  I still have on my pajamas.  I cleaned all day in my pajamas.  One of my dissertation computers actually died today.  I scrubbed the dust off all the books I used for research and off the bookshelf itself.  I recycled all the extra drafts of the papers and quite a few articles I read to understand how to talk about discouse analysis.  I was a little sad to be out of academia but I work at a job that I love and that pays quite a bit better than university work would have.

I'm  free to start a new project now and thinking it might be some creative writing.  I've been collecting books about writing but a Walter Mosley interview on NPR told me to quit reading and start writing.  He says just write 600 words per day and I'll have my novel in a year.

Never one to settle for just one opinion, I've been reading The Passionate Accurate Story by Carol Bly.  She tells me to start out by writing a list of values and 10k word autobiography.  The values will help with the story later and the autobiography will help me avoid writing about myself.  I guess if I write a 50k autobiography, I'll have a book.

I'm going to combine the advice and write 600 words a day starting with the autobiography.