The Mayan calendar ends

Welcome to the Holiday Blog Tour ... Did you have a chance to read yesterday's short story "Sacrifices" by Natasha Oliver? You should. Her story beautifully captures the intricacies of family, motherhood and identity.

Tomorrow, please visit the blog of Lupe Mendez, a truly stunning poet.

A year ago, nearly to the day, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. It's been a year of impossible decisions and recovery and reflection. Poetry is not my first language. But capturing the heady, raw emotions of what I went through seemed to call for the limitlessness that, paradoxically, only a compact form can provide. Here is my entry.

The Mayan calendar ends

We stare at the images of my breast

faceless to each other

“Here,” the doctor says, “And here.”

He traces invisible circles

claiming territory

on the spiderwebbed surface of the moon

This is where we will take

core samples

and mine for my future

The shadow of a snake appears

on the temple where sacrifices are made

Somewhere a hunter stumbles upon

a lone rabbit’s foot left

clamped in metal jaws

Down the rabbit hole

How do you define yourself -- ethnically, culturally?

As my friend & fellow writer Natasha Oliver says in her post on the Holiday Blog Tour: We might believe we're different, but we're more alike than we realize.

As a Christmas gift I bought my parents each a 23andMe kit, the same test that's featured on the PBS program Finding Your Roots hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates. It's also the same test that the FDA is trying to shut down because of the health information component. But we were mainly interested in our recent and ancient ancestry.

Oh, we thought we knew ourselves.

The boundaries of how I had defined myself culturally are an illusion. That we are different is an illusion. My world got bigger and smaller at the same time. How amazing that our skin, our blood contains this crazy treasure map of history.

I feel the endless stories that brought me to my own. I am spinning in the vastness of possibility.

Holiday blog tour starts tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow

It's that time of year again: The Holiday Blog Tour, organized by the fantabulous Icess Fernandez. It's a chance to visit the blogs of various and varied writers and get to know their work. Here's the line-up:

Dec. 16, Teresa Carbajal Ravet, SententiaVera.com
Dec. 17 Nathasha Alvarez, AudaciousLady.com
Dec. 18, Natasha Oliver, Peace and Center
Dec. 19, Nikki Kallio, Purple Houses
Dec. 20, Lupe Mendez, The Poet Mendez
Dec. 21, Anabel Lucio Morales, My Meandering Thoughts
Dec. 22, Icess Fernandez Rojas, IcessFernandez.com
Dec. 23, Regina Tingle, ReginaTingle.com


I'm up Thursday... gonna try something different ... wait for it... a poem! (gasp). It's outside of my comfort zone, but then, so was this past year. Way out of my zone. So, please stop back in on Thursday and have a look...

Letting go & letting a four-year-old do her thing

Love this story about artist Mica Angela Hendricks collaborating with her daughter on some pretty fantastic illustrations. Hendricks started with faces of old movie actors & actresses, and upon seeing her mother's beautiful new sketchbook, insisted that she get to draw in it, too. So Hendricks' daughter drew dinosaur and bug bodies to go with the heads. The result is whimsical and astounding. Hendricks is selling prints & cards here.

Ghosts in the walls

My flash fiction story "When Flowers Bloom at Night" grew out of a collaborative challenge with another artist, my uncle Curt Schroeder, an abstract painter from Milwaukee, who along with my young cousin developed a list of 32 titles and challenged me to write short stories for each of them. I'm not quite at 32, but I've written a few including "Flowers," which was honorably mentioned at the Lakefly Literary Conference in Oshkosh. So I reversed the challenge. I came up with a list of titles for my uncle, challenging him to paint art to match the titles (any interpretation). The titles included "Food Fight," (cats scrapping over a bowl of food, top) "Gutter Ball," (a man has a one-man party to scoop out his gutters) "Ghosts in the Walls," (a swath of paint on drywall) and "Bus Stop Circa 1953" (bottom). My uncle flipped the challenge yet again -- I'm supposed to write a short story to go with one of the paintings. I'm leaning toward the moodiness of "Bus Stop." We'll see what kind of trip we go on...

Bloom

Earlier this summer I was honorably mentioned for my flash fiction story, "When Flowers Bloom at Night" as a part of the Lakefly Literary Conference contest. Scroll down to the bottom to read this short shorty.

Collision & collaboration

So my friend Ellen the poet and I have decided to have another collision. Today I sent her what I imagine to be a challenging pre-apocalyptic genre chapter with the plan that she will respond with a poem, and I'll continue the story with another chapter, and so on. One of the positives about the proliferation of self-publishing options is that we won't have to worry about publishers not knowing what to do with this strange hybrid, should we carry it to completion. Takes a lot of pressure off, allowing us just to let it become its lovely mutant self.