Lord And Hearth

I’m having a blast writing again. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so prolific. The response to a number of the poems on Paper Screams is very encouraging. Since I’ve connected my media output to FB, Instagram and Google-Plus, a number of new readers have connected to me and they’ve begun to follow and comment. I’m really happy about that.

What I love most is being able to step out of my old wrangling with self and emotion to reach into imagery and stories about the things I love and dream about. I’ve captured the West, the desert, scenes of Europe and places that inspire me; rambling, I guess you could call it.

Having an audience is wonderful, of course, but I’ve found that reading through these considerably less introspective (and intense) pieces of work is pretty therapeutic. As always, my poetry exists as if I, myself, didn’t really write it. Each time I go back and read my own, I feel like I’m reading something from the outside of me. It’s true of my spiritual and emotional stuff, too, but the new things like the Lost Chalks Sessions really are fantastic to revisit.

As I’ve said a number of times in the past, I’d love to bookify my poetry. This time, I may be closer – there’s some real material to harvest from Paper Screams that could produce a couple of volumes. Maybe I’m not worth money, but for me, even if I’m the only interested owner of a couple of hardback Paper Screams anthologies, a couple of books would be something to hug myself over.

Instagram is important here, because I’ve been enabled to include images with my words, something I’ve toyed with in the past, but now finds a real medium in which it’s worthy. And to do a book with the same format sounds really cool. I’m inspired by Louis L’Amour’s Frontier, done with David Muench and other older books like Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland and the Oz books that have images. The purist “no pictures” bunch is missing a valid point in the experience department. Words are great, but there’s a whole lot more when you can emphasize your message with a well-selected and placed image.

Either way, that’s where I’m at these days. Nothing big, just a few words on my old favorite subject.