Poems about Partners – Page 2 – Heather Grace Stewart

March 5, 2013March 4, 2013

Bet You Didn’t Know!

My talented author pal Elisa Lorello tagged me in a blog hop, and I thought it would be a fun way for you to learn more about her, more about me (in the interview below), and to ‘meet’ some of my other talented author friends.

Elisa Lorello is a best-selling novelist and the author of four books: Faking It, Ordinary World, Why I Love Singlehood (co-authored with Sarah Girrell), and her latest, Adulation. Currently on sabbatical from teaching, Elisa recently returned to the northeast from North Carolina, where she is busy developing new projects (she’s superstitious and never talks about her works in progress!) and getting re-acquainted with snow. Elisa’s blog post will be about Adulation–perfect for Oscar season! Please visit Elisa at I’ll Have What She’s Having.

I am tagging the following authors in this ‘blog hop.’ Could you please visit them this week? I think you’ll love getting to know them and their work.

Arianna Merritt: Author, M.Ed., Learning and Development Specialist

Website: http://ariannasrandomthoughts.com

Nate Hendley: Author & Freelance Writer

Blog: http://crimestory.wordpress.com/ Website: www.natehendley.com

Mark Stratton: Poet/writer – poetry collection “Tender Mercies” available here: (http://radio-nowhere.org/nb/?page_id=766) and website here: http://radio-nowhere.org/nb

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW…

AN INTERVIEW WITH HEATHER GRACE STEWART

Tell me about your writing process. Do you plan out what you’re writing or sit down and do it? What was the greatest surprise about this writing process for you?

I plan to write, but I don’t always plan what I’m going to write. Unless I have a magazine deadline or I’m writing a presentation, I set aside time, usually 7:30 in the morning to noon, to write creatively. I try to avoid distractions like the Net and the phone until noon. As far as plot, poems just come to me and I go with the feel of the poem and then edit later. I’m working on a novella right now, and I did plot a little down on paper, including character sketches, but I find what works better for me is to just sit and write for a few weeks without any rules. Just stream of consciousness, every morning.

That’s been the biggest surprise to me. I didn’t realize plotting out can sometimes strain my writing. The Friends I’ve Never Met. was a story that just woke me up like an alarm clock at 4 a.m. every morning for several weeks, without fail, and I found I just had to go write this story down. After a few weeks I went back and made sure the plot and characters were working, and then I fattened everything up, and did many, many edits.

Ideas come to me in the shower, and especially while I’m driving alone, so I have learned to use a small tape recorder whenever I go on a road trip. I used to try to write on a yellow sticky note at the stop lights, but I could never read my writing later. I’m going to try texting myself, too!
What was your worst job ever? (doesn’t have to be about writing) and why? What did you learn from it?

When I was 16 I worked at a Rifle Range. I had to sweep up barracks and clean the toilets. That wasn’t so bad, but the army officer in charge was weird and made me put up heavy tents in the blazing July heat, and then take them down as soon as they’d been put up, as if I were in the army too. I experienced a lot of harassment and sexism that summer. I think it made me ballsier. I didn’t take crap from a boss ever again after that. Ha ha, maybe that’s why I work for myself!
If you knew tonight was your last meal for a week, what would you eat?

Probably many many slices of pineapple cheese pizza with green olives. And a pint of beer – Heineken or Tsing Tao- mabye even a Hoegaarden. And vanilla ice cream for dessert, with Smucker’s hot fudge on top. Okay this interview is making me hungry.

How do you feel about frogs?

I have a special relationship with frogs. I truly love them! Besides being fascinated by the biology, like how they get oxygen through their skin, since I was very young, I’ve been able to catch them easily ( the other kids coined me the Green Lake Frog Catcher) and get them to stay on my palm for over 10 minutes with out hopping off. I rub their temples and pat them and they stay. I’m the Frog Whisperer.
Where’s your favourite place to chill out, and why?

There’s a private beach on Cape Cod ~ it’s actually the cover of my latest book, Three Spaces, and it’s so quiet and full of fascinating aquatic life. My daughter and husband love exploring it after the tide goes out late afternoon. We try to save crabs and starfish by throwing them in deeper. The private beach belongs to a small motel, and compared to other places we’ve vacationed, it isn’t expensive to stay there, but if I tell you any more it won’t be my favourite place to chill out any more. 🙂

February 21, 2013

Give Yourself Some Breathing Space

Hey there!
Just a thank you to all you Kindle readers for picking up Three Spaces in THREE countries!
I am thrilled that it has been sold in the Canadian Kindle store (Amazon.ca), the US store (Amazon.com), and the UK (Amazon.co.uk) It has ‘charted’ as #1 in Kindle Books>Canadian Poetry on Amazon.ca and also hit #7 in Bestselling Canadian Poetry Books!

Yesterday was a very good day. Three Spaces was on best-selling charts in all three countries! #82 on Amazon.com in Bestselling Poetry; #84 on Amazon.co.uk in Bestselling Poetry Books (just above Milton- wow- made me laugh!) ; #7 in Bestselling Canadian Poetry Books on Amazon.ca.

While I try to take rankings lightly, as it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m selling a ton of books but just out-selling others in that category, I do try to compete with myself every time I bring out a new book.

I’m thrilled to say that this is my best-selling poetry ebook yet! And the first one to hit three bestselling Amazon charts at once!

Three Spaces will be out on Kobo, iBooks, Nook Books, Sony Reader and more soon.

Please do tell your friends about Three Spaces (share this post!). It’s got prose as well as poetry this time, and full colour photography for those nifty colour e-readers.

Thanks again so much for buying & sharing!

Heather

March 16, 2012

Review: Heather Grace Stewart’s Carry On Dancing (Winter Goose Publishing, 2012)

In the introduction to her latest book, Canadian poet Heather Grace Stewart describes what follows as ‘my small adventure’. In many ways, that’s a fair enough opening gambit. As she’s shown in Leap and Where The Butterflies Go, Heather is an accomplished and supple lyricist of the everyday and of the small miracles and telling moments which interrupt its routines (that some of these moments are also recorded in the poet’s own photographs is a bonus).

In this new collection, ‘Bookmarks’ is a finely honed example: a guitar sitting against a wall becomes ‘a bright reminder of/easier days’, but this souvenir of a personal belle époque is set against ordinary household chores – leaves being raked up outdoors, ‘the laundry,/left to fold’ – before the mood shifts and, outside, the sound of ‘laughter is the song/that fills/our sunlit yard.’ It’s a poem of only seventeen short lines, but it unpacks its momentary domestic occasion with the simplicity, precision and resonances of a pointillist interior. Similarly, ‘No Matter’ rises from its kitchen occasion to a dance ‘through the rainstorms/in this beautiful mess of a home’; while ‘Marilyn’ plays out a ‘little silly’ fantasy between ‘her Knight with Shining Briefcase’ coming home from work and ‘his spaghetti-stained/pinup girl gone wrong’ amongst ‘overpriced groceries, bills long overdue’ and ‘dinner thawing like their days’.

However, as the declaration of independence in opening poem ‘Enough’ puts it, ‘I am not my Facebook, my blog, or any of my Tweets,/I am not my purse, my shoes or my unmade bed’, and Heather’s palette extends way beyond these well-wrought vignettes. For a start, many of these poems are themselves shadowed by darker thoughts and suggestions, an often unspecified ‘dark matter’ – as in ‘I Melt’ with its plea to ‘let’s hold onto this picture’; in ‘On Days Like This’ with its admission ‘Sometimes I hold on/too tight’; or, more openly, in the first couplet of the William Carlos Williams-echoing ‘Maybe It’s Your Love’: ‘Maybe it’s your love/and all this death around us.’ Death haunts other poems, too – poignantly in poems about her daughter like ‘She Drew Me a Sky’ and ‘The Present’, and in the beautifully simple aubade and love poem which ends – and in many ways draws together – the themes of the whole collection, ‘Longer’:

just beneath

our breathing,

the humming fridge,

morning traffic –

The dead, they whisper:

No work that will not wait

till tomorrow.

Perhaps more so even than her previous collections, however, Carry On Dancing expands into poetry which addresses issues ranging from bullying (‘Words’) to gun law (‘Guns’: ‘the laughable laws/the ones that get made/and unmade/like an antique bed’) and war (‘Unrest’), whilst also demonstrating both Heather’s playful wit – ‘Kindlus Interruptus’, ‘Twaiku’ and a number of snappy ‘he said/she said’ dialogue poems – and fashioning of longer, more overtly performance-y style humorous and/or satirical pieces like ‘Boobies’ and ‘Should I Ever Become THAT Poet’.

All told, in fact, Carry On Dancing reveals Heather to be a poet who has very much come into her stride, leaving images and moments to speak (more than) themselves, but also confidently deploying a repertoire of styles and forms, from haiku and sometimes acerbic, sometimes aphoristic apercus to polished lyric, and deftly building ambiguities and embedded puns into the most seemingly direct turns of phrase: ‘with wired words they will write/my legacy, and get it wrong’; ‘she said yes,/no hesitation’. Perhaps Carry On Dancing doesn’t represent quite such a small adventure after all. (Tom Phillips)

Heather Grace Stewart, Author — Heather Grace Stewart & Carry On Dancing, March 2012

March 15, 2012

I’ll Meet You…

March 15, 2011February 25, 2012

Poet Robert Smith

untitled love poem

‘i have sat among those in love and watched it live
and die right before my eyes’ the old man said to me
my heart was crumbling with loss and here was the
old man talking to me in my moment of
solitude
pain
suffering
anguish
loss.
‘full love is as rare as a full life. i lost mine
a long time ago.’ he told me.
‘how’s that?’
‘i lost her with my lies.’
‘you deceived her?’
‘and myself. i told her it was over, i told
her i no longer cared, that my mind and soul
were mixed up. haste makes such waste. i wish
i only knew then what i know now.’
‘what’s that?’
He ignored my question.
‘i let her go you know. painfully, sorrowfully.
i was depressed. i could have gotten her
i know i could have changed her mind.
i just didn’t try. i wasn’t thinking straight.
foolish man pride. i should have tried harder,
flowers, candy, love letters, all corny, but true.
i could have sang her a song, wrote her name
in the sky, told her that i lied. i lied when i said
it was over. i lied when i said i didn’t love her
no more. i lied when i said that she was the fool.
i know that it is the heart that makes the young man
such a fool. for if the young man truly loves with all
of his heart he will give whatever it takes,
and take whatever he gets, to achieve
love.’

______________________

Robert Smith is a poet originally from Outside of Buffalo, NY, who lived in California, but now lives in Georgia. His Twitter page @rasmithii says he tweets his poems “from an airport near you.”

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