Susan Taylor Brown

Ann Patchett and Lessons from a hummingbird

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:09:45 GMT

On the blog today, Ann Patchett and Lessons from a hummingbird

Audio guest post!

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:46:15 GMT

Hear me read my pantoum poem and get the story behind the poem. I'm guest pod posting at Katie Davis Brain Burps.

Kick the Poetry Can'ts #3 and #4

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:02:09 GMT

I forgot to post over here but prompts and original poems are up for Kick the Poetry Can'ts #3 and #4.

Here's #3
http://bit.ly/GzwN1c

Here's #4
http://bit.ly/GzyewC

Kick the Poetry Can'ts #2

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:01:49 GMT

Learn how question cards can help you write a poem.

Kick the Poetry Can'ts

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:57:48 GMT

Post # 1 in the month long series for National Poetry month.

Read an original poem, get a mini poetry lesson, and then write along with me.

Round 3 - March Madness Poetry tournament

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:12:53 GMT

Well I won my round 2 match in the poetry tournament and my round 3 has just been posted. I have the word "impaled" and am up against the very talented Greg Pincus who has the word "truce." After you check out our match, make sure you go back to the Live Scoreboard and read the various other match-ups going on.

Go here to read and vote.

Marissa Moss launching a new picture book publisher

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:53:30 GMT

Marissa Moss is launching a new publishing company via Kickstarter. Golden Gate Books plans to fill the void left behind by the major New York publishers who no longer put out a broad range of quality picture books. They will be devoted to publishing quality picture books printed in the USA on sustainably-sourced paper

Check out her kickstarter campaign to raise $50K in 30 days
http://kck.st/GzmsSW

Even small donations can add up and help get this new publisher off the ground.

And yes, I'm backing this wonderful project.

Round 2 - March Madness Poetry tournament

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:30:25 GMT

Thanks to all of you who voted and helped me win the first round in the March Madness Poetry tournament. My new poem for the next round is up now. This time it is translucent vs cement.

Please read & vote for your fav and help us get the word out. We'd like to double the votes from the last round. Voting is only open for about a day and a half.

Thank you!

Being true to your writer self

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:24:56 GMT

On the new blog, a post about what I put myself through for the "fun" poetry competition. We writers are too hard on ourselves.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/being-true/

My poetry match-up please vote

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:57:42 GMT

So I signed up to be in this crazy poetry madness event where children's poets are randomly seeded (kinda like basketball tournaments) and are randomly assigned words with a difficulty of 1 (easy) to 16 (ouch!) and have to write a poem appropriate for kids. Then we're randomly matched up in a head-to-head tournament. We have a short time to write the poems and then readers vote and the winners of the match-ups go on to the next round.

I'd love the chance to continue but I have to win this round. I had the good/unfortunate luck of being seeded 16 which gives me the impossible words. I got nonconfrontational for the first round.

Anyway, they're short, 8 lines or less, and I'm begging for folks to go read, at least my match-up, and vote for the ones they like best.
http://www.thinkkidthink.com/1-carve-vs-16-nonconfrontational

Of course I hope you'll like mine enough to vote for me. :)

Poppines at last - my new garden website is live

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:25:46 GMT

At last, the garden website is live! Posts about how we converted our small urban lot into a California Native Garden for wildlife, with info & photos about how created the various water features, rainwater collection, and more.

Come visit POPPINESS!

Art Show update!

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 05:12:32 GMT

On the blog today - a post about the art show I am in and the opening reception last night.
http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/art-show-update/

letter to characters

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:35:37 GMT

On the new blog today, some long overdue letters to characters.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/letters-to-characters-14/

Tell me something good!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:48:53 GMT

Today on the blog, your chance to brag. Please come over and tell me all about what you do well.

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/tell-me-something-good-about-you/

The new blog is up! Please come visit!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:28:15 GMT

My new blog is up and running on my pretty new website. All the content from here (The Of Dogs & Writing posts, all the Incarcerated Teen Poets posts, the journey through poetry to find my father which led me to finding my sister and more) has been moved over and is now better organized so you can find things.

I hope you'll come by and say hello!

http://www.susantaylorbrown.com/blog/

What I've decided to do about this blog

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:51:20 GMT

Is to make it friends only.

And I'm going to set it up so that only friends can comment on it. If you don't have a LiveJournal account, don't worry, I'll be posting the URL for the new blog here and you can follow me over there. This way I can still visit with friends who are just on LiveJournal and I can feel free to rant if I need to.

I was going to turn off comments and then I realized if I did that, all the comments from all the previous years of posts would be hidden and I didn't want to do that. I just went to grab some comments I had made in someone else's journal and they had disabled comments and now I can't find them. :(

For this entry, it's still open for the public.

waving

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:45:42 GMT

I'm waving to all my LiveJournal friends. I haven't posted in ages for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you all with now. But I did want to update a few things since I am cleaning up around LJ.

First off, if you view my LJ in its own setting it might look a little wonky as I've been moving web hosts and forgot that I had my LJ graphics hosted on my website. I'll get those straightened up soon.

Second, I'm moving to WordPress, the transition is almost done. I know, I know, another one bites the dust. But I'm moving twice! Once for the writing blog and once for my garden/nature blog. I'll post the info here most likely next week.

Third, to prep for the migration of my old journal entries over to the new blog I'm going through and deleting some posts that were kept to a small private group. I've saved copies of them but I don't want them public if LJ should fall apart and when you import, quite often your private stuff goes public so I just want to remove that chance.

I miss LJ and connecting with all of you around our virtual water cooler, especially those I don't see over on Facebook which seems to be an easier place for me to be of late.

Hope everyone in LJ land is doing well.

Some recent artsy stuff

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:21:02 GMT

I'm off to a writing retreat this weekend and am taking some of my collage supplies to share with my friends so we can have some art fun. These are some inspiration cards I did up quickly for examples for them. The small ones are ATC size and the larger ones are those pesky magazine subscription cards. :)

Poetry Friday - Proof of Life, an original poem

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:23:19 GMT

It's been a while since I participated in Poetry Friday. I've missed it. Last night I attended a local poetry reading by San Francisco poet, Dean Rader. He read from his book Works & Days which I highly recommend. He's a terrific reader and his poems are very accessible. And if you are looking for a kidlit connection, well he writes about Frog and Toad. Yes, THE Frog and Toad, but the poems are NOT for children.

The reading was hosted by The Willow Glen Poetry Project which is a terrific group that meets less than ten minutes from my house. I'm so glad I found them. After Dean's reading it was an open mic night and I got to hear a variety of talented poets read their own and a few poetry lovers read poems by other writers.

I decided at nearly the last minute to read too. An original poem that wasn't from my YA novel-in-progress, that wasn't written with my normal kidlit world in mind. These simple facts shouldn't matter but the thing is, they do. They do because I can't remember the last time I had such an adrenalin attack and then adrenalin rush. I speak in front of people all the time with no fear (anymore) but this was a brand-new arena for me where I was a total stranger. No one knew I had been published or not. No one was there because they paid to hear me speak. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I love it!

This poem had it's genesis back in April of this year when, after taking the month of March off to play, I tried to distill the experience in a poem a day for National Poetry Month. The original poem appeared here. The new and much revised version is below.

Proof of Life
by Susan Taylor Brown

I find it hard to take anything on faith alone.

I want proof, facts to nourish the idea that mindfulness
is worth the time it takes away
from doing nothing.

Easier to cave in to echoes from the past,
nodding as they aim ink-stained arrows
at my list of undone dreams.

I think I'm finally (okay, just beginning) to understand.
Be here now is not defined
by climbing mountains and vanquishing dragons,
it is a never-ending journey
away from
back to
face-to-face with
the me I can never trust
is good enough.

Today I shadow-step the dog on garden patrol,
down the path behind the hedgerow where unwelcome Bermuda grass
creeps under the good-neighbor fence,
along the side yard filled with dogwoods, leaves still clinging
to the almost-red-for-winter branches,
and past the pond where goldfinches gather for their morning bath.

Nose to the ground, she gobbles any bugs that cross her path,
bugs that will make her throw up in the middle of the night,
bugs she will happily eat again the next day.

This is her religion, her testimony to me.
She will keep me safe from all things,
even from myself.

We weave a new path through the overgrown herb garden
until the scent of mint and sage clings to us both
until she has finally sniffed everything that could be sniffed
until she is content to sprawl in a puddle of sun,
trusting I will not stray far.

She knows how brave I’m not.

A lone, but not lonely Ceanothus
hugs the fence, just beyond her shadow.

Industrious honey bees,
fuzzy bumblebees,
plump carpenter bees
and hover bees that look like flies,
all swarm the blue blossoms,
ignoring the now sleeping, snoring dog
ignoring each other
ignoring me.

Faith isn’t always found in stained glass cathedrals.

I let go,
let go of unclimbed mountains and dragons still breathing fire,
let go of everything that isn’t here and now,
let hungry, happy bees buzz all around me
and listen to the concert
I almost missed.

© Susan Taylor Brown
All rights reserved.

Jama has the Poetry Friday Round-up at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Please check out all the great postings. And come back next week when I'll share some of the poetry books I'm reading as a panelist for this year's Cybils!

Letters to Characters

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:24:07 GMT

Dear Boyfriend of Sister #1,
You two have been together a long time. Why? Tell me what attracts you to her. I know a lot of your downs, mostly hers. I don't know any of the highs. You can't hang around in this book as some sort of eye-candy. That's not going to work.

Tell me what she does that really ticks you off. Tell me why she doesn't have any close girlfriends. Tell me if you think the two of you will still be together by the end of this book.

Dear Little Brother of Sister #1,
Tell me your favorite memory you share with your sister. Is she nice to you? Does she help you clean your room or do your homework? Do you ever spy on her?

So far you're acting a lot like a dog in a book, a dog that doesn't really need to be there. If I can yank you out of the story and not notice, well, you're going to be history pretty soon.

Dear Mother of Sister #1,
Do you have a backbone or a heart? I can't figure out which.

Have you told her the truth or nothing but lies?

And that husband you have now, how much does he really know about the real story?

Signed,
me

Pssst! Wanna know a secret?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:39:23 GMT

I'm working on a podcast series for YouTube. I am having so much fun. It will be part motivation, finding the courage to create, part poetry workshop, and part sharing of some of my poems.

I'm having so much fun.

And I can't figure out if I should do strictly video stuff on YouTube or just audio or a combo of both.

A few late blooms in my native garden

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:22:12 GMT

I took a stroll through the garden today and found a few things still in bloom.

California Fuschia

California Fuschia

Refugio manzanita

Mallow

Cleveland Sage

Lacewing egg

One of our many wasps

Recent art

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:17:02 GMT

Some of you have already seen this on Facebook or Google+ and if so, I apologize for the repeats. I'm still getting myself back up to speed with posting to my various regular haunts.

Here's the journey through a recent piece of art I did for a memorial book for a friend who had recently passed.

This was the beginning.

Next phase after many more layers.

And the final version.

I learned a lot through this process.

It was just a little thing

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:56:50 GMT

Really. Just a little thing to share some new words of a new project with my weekly goal's group, not my critique group of published writers, a group of readers who would just be listening for story and not thinking about construction and whether or not the book had the potential to sell.

It was just a little thing to read seven poems about one of the sisters in my novel. Really. Just a little thing. Or was it?

I've been away from writing and sharing and critiquing for a while so the thought of putting myself and my words out there made me feel all quivery in my stomach, just like a brand-new writer. But I printed out some pages and put them in the car before I could give myself a chance to change my mind. After all, I didn't have to read them if I didn't want to.

At my goal's group we go around the room and share the progress we've made in our creative life over the last week and talk about our plans for the coming week.I listened to a couple of friends, one beating herself up for not getting things done and another who regularly sets and achieves her goals. And then it was my turn.

The last few months while I've been getting physically healthy I've been doing a lot of thinking, trying to let go of excess emotional baggage (okay, all emotional baggage is excess and needs to be dumped.) I've spent many years measuring my writing worth against too many of the wrong things --- Whether I write like someone else or as often as someone else. Whether I sell to a certain publisher or make a certain amount of money. Whether I get mentioned some place or not. Whether my reviews are good or bad or whether my books are even reviewed.

Like I said, all the wrong measurements.

Because for me, my writing worth can't be measured by what someone else does or doesn't do for me or to me.

I needed to remind myself of that. The reason I write may not be the reason anyone else writes and that's okay. I've felt a change in my writing self the last few months. Less need to compare, to feel jealously, to worry that I am somehow not doing it right.

I'm doing it the only way I know how. My way.

Writing has always been my way of making sense of the world. I write to discover who I am and why I think and feel the way I do. I write to explore the implications of choices I have made and to investigate the whys behind those choices. I write because writing defines me.

So today, when it was my turn to share about my week, I picked up a few poems and shared a bit of my WIP with readers who just wanted to hear an interesting story. They laughed at what I thought were the funny places. They gasped when I shocked them. And I could see in their eyes that question that every storyteller hopes to see in their audience, "What happens next?"

The best stories, the ones that stick in our hearts and minds, are the ones that reflect life as it is, not as we wish it were. The ones that bring us up close and personal. Sometimes the significance of a piece of work is not just in the work itself but in the memories each reader, and each writer, brings to it.

This is why I write.

I'm going to try and remember that.

Hello blog. Where I've been while I've been gone.

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:16:23 GMT

Hello blog. It's been a while. First things slowed down (in the middle of the series about my incarcerated teen poets) because Livejournal had the attack on their servers and then, well, life intervened, as it has a way of doing. And even though people say you don't need to say to write a post about being gone I feel compelled to say a few things. Three, I think.

Number one, a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of going to Las Vegas to speak at their SCBWI conference. I had a wonderful time talking about creating characters and met some enthusiastic writers. But if that wasn't enough of an event, the day after the conference I had the pleasure of finally meeting the half-sister I never knew I had.

My lovely niece capture the very first hug.

What do you think, can you see a resemblence?

We spent a wonderful day together talking about similarities and differences and telling family stories. And as I posted on Facebook (forgive me for those of you reading this/seeing pics a second time) there will always be a hole in my heart from not knowing my dad but getting to my sister and some of the rest of the family goes a long way toward filling that up again.

Second, I've been spending a lot of my time and energy on learning how to eat in new ways and man, that takes more time than I realized. It's taken most of my focus just to get into these new habits but now I'm feeling like yes, they are habits. I'm maintaining the healthy course I want to be on and I don't feel at all deprived. I've lost 38 pounds so far and plan on keeping with the program until I am as healthy as I can be and then staying on the program to keep myself that way. And by "program" I don't mean something like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or some diet with a catchy name. I count calories and track it every day. I've cut out sugar and flour except for rare occassions. And that's about it. It really is that simple.

And third, I've been able to focus on my writing again. At last. In the past year I've let go of a ton of emotional baggage that has been weighing me down for years. And then there's the whole getting healthy thing. Not eating the right foods was rotting my brain and affecting my ability to focus. So I'm back to work, hard and fast, on my YA verse novel, coincidentally enough, about a very interesting pair of sisters. I'm sure you'll get to know them a bit better as the character letters start going back and forth again.

I'm a lucky gal. Life is good and I'm smart enough to know it. You know those songs where they say, "I feel like I could fly..." Well it's like that.

Yeah, just like that.

So hello blog, I've missed you.