Podcast appearances and mentions of Mark Doty

Mark Doty is married with three kids and lives in San Diego, CA.  He left a successful career in Medical Device Sales to become a real estate developer in 2021.  He combines various rental models with the new ADU regulations on his infill projects.  He's complete 12 projects in San Diego and is building a team to buy, build and improve $50 million dollars of San Diego real estate over the next 3 years.  You can find him on YouTube, LinkedIn or at his website to learn more (DotyCapitalGroup.com) Chapters 00:00 - Intro 02:59 - ADU Development: Addressing the Housing Crisis 06:23 - Finding Properties for ADU Development 08:32 - Zoning and Increasing Density for ADU Projects 11:16 - Financial Aspects of ADU Projects 15:06 - Investing in ADU Projects: Returns and Strategies Takeaways Mark Doty transitioned from a corporate job to full-time real estate investing and found success in ADU development in San Diego. ADU development addresses the affordable housing crisis in California by utilizing existing infrastructure and increasing housing density. Finding properties suitable for ADU development involves looking for small houses on large flat lots and considering proximity to public transportation. The financial aspect of ADU projects includes the potential for high returns through increased property value and the option to sell or hold the assets. Investors in ADU projects can expect a higher return on investment at the end of the project rather than regular monthly cash flow. Mark Doty is developing a mid-rise apartment complex in San Diego by converting a single-family house and building additional ADUs in the front yard. The project is aimed at accredited investors who are looking for long-term returns. Investors can expect quarterly updates during the entitlement process, which can take up to a year. The project is a development and sell strategy, with a goal of doubling the investment in five years. Understanding zoning regulations and conducting thorough due diligence are crucial in this type of development project. RANDY SMITH Connect with our host, Randy Smith, for more educational content or to discuss investment opportunities in the real estate syndication space at www.impactequity.net, https://www.linkedin.com/in/randallsmith or on Instagram at @randysmithinvestor

Explore the path to Mark Doty's success and the challenges driving his thriving real estate business in one of the country's most competitive markets. Learn the ins and outs of infield development and ADUs, and get inspired by his innovative strategies for generating passive income. Hop in!     Key Takeaways To Listen For The impact of California's ADU regulations on urban development Lessons learned from navigating entitlement processes and dealing with city regulations Strategies for successful partnerships and identifying the right partners Why real estate investing requires networking and mentoring Insights into scaling real estate projects and building a team     Resources/Links Mentioned In This Episode Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki | Paperback and Kindle  Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy | Paperback, Hardcover, and Kindle  10x is Easier Than 2x by Dan Martell | Paperback, Hardcover, and Kindle  BiggerPockets     About Mark Doty After reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad in 2007, Mark started working on real estate projects.  For several years, he worked on projects while he progressed in a sales career in corporate America. After several projects and being fed up with life as an employee, Mark took control of his career by quitting his Medical Device sales job to start his own business.   Mark is happily married to Erika and the proud parents of three young kids. When he isn't chasing after the kids, Mark loves to smoke ribs and catch a football or basketball game.     Connect with Mark  Website: Doty Capital Group LinkedIn: Mark Doty Instagram: @dotycapital YouTube: Doty Capital Group     Connect With Us If you're looking to invest your hard-earned money into cash-flowing, value-add assets, reach out to us at https://bobocapitalventures.com/.     Follow Keith's social media pages LinkedIn: Keith Borie Investor Club: Secret Passive Cashflow Investors Club Facebook: Keith Borie X: @BoboLlc80554

Today I revisit the life and legacy of lyric baritone William Parker (05 August 1943 – 29 March 1993), to whom I devoted an episode exactly a year ago. To further explore his unmatched contribution to the art of song, I present a second episode which was originally published as a bonus episode at the same time, featuring Will in four contrasting song cycles by Charles Wakefield Cadman, Claude Debussy, Aaron Copland, and Francis Poulenc, recorded between 1975 and 1987, when he was in his absolute prime. He is accompanied by William Huckaby, Gérard van Blerk, and the late Rudolf Jansen. Also included are two haunting settings of Herman Melville's “Billy in the Darbies,” a segment added posthumously to his Billy Budd novella; in two settings by Robert Evett and Ernst Bacon. The episode is prefaced by a brief tribute to the pianist Norman Shetler, who died yesterday in Austria nine days after observing his 93rd birthday; as well as a brief introduction by Will Parker's nephew, Mark Doty. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season.  

In episode 3, season 2 of The Write Attention podcast Brittany and Jeannetta discuss style in light of Miciah Bay Gault's craft essay on style (link below) and the influence our real and adopted selves have on the form and content of the work we create. They jointly work on the exercise offered in Gault's essay to write on loss in the style of another writer.   Craft essay referenced in this episode is “I Craft Therefore I am Creating Persona Through Syntax and Style” by Miciah Bay Gault, accessible here: https://hungermtn.org/i-craft-therefore-i-am-creating-persona-through-syntax-and-style/ Kurt Vonnegut essay on style, https://kmh-lanl.hansonhub.com/pc-24-66-vonnegut.pdf  John Keene, https://lithub.com/john-keene-elements-of-literary-style/  Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon James Baldwin,  Giovanni's Room, Another Country George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain Poor Things, https://www.searchlightpictures.com/poor-things/  The Lobster, https://a24films.com/films/the-lobster  Lighthouse classes can be found here: The Earley Scale, check out more about it here: https://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/going-cold/ Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word Donna Tartt  The Write Attention S2E2 with Amelia Ihshak, The Emerging Reader in All of Us, https://writeattention.podbean.com/e/the-emerging-reader-in-all-of-us/  Ward Farnsworth, Classical English Style, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49831663  William Carlos Williams Lidia Yuknavitch Corporeal Writing: https://www.corporealwriting.com/about-corporeal and https://youtu.be/o9pUjixyWI4?si=4u4VaF4gE_N3yYsT Toni Ann Johnson Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies

Belle of Cincinnati Captain Alan Bernstein and Belle of Louisville Captain Mark Doty join Brian and Trisha at the AT&T Morning Line.

Mark Doty is a poet, essayist, memoirist and author of nine books of poetry. His book Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award. He has also received other literary awards, including the Whiting Writers Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His poetry collection “My Alexandria” was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Doty has also received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Bynner Prize. Doty's most recent book is What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (Norton), a memoir about his poetic relationship with Walt Whitman. Doty is a distinguished professor of English and the director of Writers House at Rutgers University.-bio via Library of Congress Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Get on your spurs & chaps and join our country queens down at the poetry gay bar!Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.      James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.Please consider buying your books from Bluestockings Cooperative, a feminist and queer indie bookselling cooperative.Watch Miranda Lambert calling out some selfie-takers and the ladies of The View talking about it. And watch her sing "Tin Man" here.Watch Jennifer L. Knox read "Crushing It" here.Maybe the most memorable Tammy Wynette reference is this one from Sordid Lives. "He looked just like Tammy....in the early years," one character says about her brother."Billy Collins is to good poetry what Kenny G is to Charlie Parker" reads this scathing pan of the poet. You can watch Richard Howard read from his poems here (~60 min).Anne Carson is in conversation with Lannan Foundation's Michael Silverblatt here (30 min).Terrance HayesRead B.H. Fairchild's "A Starlit Night" from 32 Poems here.Read "Chopin in Palma," the Susan Mitchell poem in Best American Poetry 2023 (first published in Harvard Review) here. Listen to Mark Doty talk all things Whitman (~50 min)You can watch Frank Bidart read his serial-killer poem "Herbert White" here (~8 min)Here's an amazing tribute to Lucille Clifton organized by SAG-AFTRA, with readings by Geena Davis, Tantoo Cardinal, Isabella Gomez, Mark St. Cyr, Candace Nicholas Lippman, Max Gail, Nicco Annan; Lynne Thompson;  Sidney Clifton; Madeline di Nonno; and  Rochelle Rose. (~70 min)Read Matthew Dickman's poem "Grief."Here's Susan Mitchell's CV.

In the years between 1980 and her death at age thirty-nine in an automobile accident in 1994, the late Lynda Hull composed a body of work that marks her as one of the great lyric poets of our generation, including two prize-winning collections, Ghost Money (1986) and Star Ledger (1991), and a posthumous third collection, The Only World (1995). In 2006, all three collections were brought together in a single volume, Lynda Hull: Collected, in Graywolf's RE/VIEW series edited by Mark Doty. During her life, Hull was teacher and mentor to many poets, one whose devotion to her students and to the art of poetry demonstrates, as Mark Doty has written of her, “how transformative the exchanges between teacher and student might be." In this Eleventh Hour, we'll remember Lynda Hull and celebrate her enduring legacy as both a brilliant poet and a generous and remarkable teacher.

“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you have forgotten what you are. So I really understand why you are ill and how to cure you. For because you are wandering, forgetful of your true self, you grieve that you are an exile and stripped of your goods; since indeed you do not know the goal and end of all things, you think that evil and wicked men are fortunate and powerful; since indeed you have forgotten what sort of governance the world is guided by, you think these fluctuations of fortune uncontrolled. All these are quite enough to cause not merely sickness but even death. But I thank the author of all health that you have not yet wholly lost your true nature.”The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius has a little of everything: poetry and prose, autobiography and philosophy; bright and lively writing and… maybe some boring bits, especially in the last two sections. But it was written by a man who found himself thrown in jail and condemned to death; who can blame him for trying to use philosophy—or, a dialogue with the personification of Philosophy herself—to make sense of his life? Chris and Suzanne discuss how this complex poem intersects with a lot of other literary works, and argue about the uneasy marriage of philosophy and poetry.SHOW NOTES.Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy. [Bookshop.]Our episodes on The Symposium, Augustine's Confessions, The Book of the City of Ladies, Paradiso, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of Philosophy has a nice medieval depiction of Fortune's wheel.Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German text. See also Mark Doty talking about this poem.)Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.]Support The Spouter-Inn and our network on Patreon — it helps us make the show, and it gives you access to our friendly Discord!

April 25, 2023 - "Little Mammoth" By Mark Doty, Read By Hugh Sheehy by The Desmond-Fish Public Library & The Highlands Current, hosted by Ryan Biracree

The queens get stately in this episode devoted to poetic queries and statements.Please consider supporting the poets we mention by buying their books at an indie bookstore. We can recommend Loyalty Books, a black-owned DC-area bookseller.The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry is edited by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. It's essential reading.You can read the entire  Linda McCarriston poem, “Healing the Mare” here.Read Chen Chen's “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me” (first published in Pank) here. Chen's book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (selected by Jericho Brown) and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry. Follow him on Twitter @chenchenwrites and visit his official website.Read “Effort at Speech Between Two People” by Muriel Rukeyser here.Watch Erika Meitner, Victoria Redel, and Patricia Smith here (~90 min)Cortney Lamar Charleston's book Dopplegangbangers is his second book, published by Haymarket Books in 2021. His first book is Telepathologies, winner of the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Visit his website here.Read  Larry Levis's poem “In the City of Light"  here.Read Jennifer L. Knox's poem “Old Women Talking About Death” here. Another of her great poems: “how to manage your adult adhd” appears here in American Poetry Review. Visit Knox's website here. Brenda Hillman's website can be visited here.  You can read “First Thought” (from the book Bright Existence)  here.  And watch her read from multiple books in this 2013 reading here (~17 min).Mark Doty writes about the class he shared with Brenda Hillman on his blog here. 

Hot goss about Victorian poet(s) Michael Field precedes a conversation about the deep loss of animals, and the intimacy, friendship, and love we share with them.Please consider supporting the poets we mention in today's show! If you need a good indie bookstore, we recommend Loyalty Bookstores, a DC-area Black-owned bookshop.We reference a scene from the show Yellowstone where Beth tells her son Carter the universal truths of getting money. You can watch that clip here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=118&v=a68StSECIGI&feature=emb_logoRead more criticism and biography about Michael Field here.Read more poems by Michael Field here. Links to poems we read during this episode include:Jane Kenyon's "Biscuit"Paisley Rekdal's "Once" Bruce Weigl's "May"We'll add to this list of other poems about the love we give to and receive from animals here. Suggest some on our social media.Carl Phillips: "Something to Believe In"Marie Howe: "Buddy"Mark Doty: "Golden Retrievals"Victoria Redel: "The Pact"Mary Oliver: "Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night" (see Oliver read it here).Kevin Young: "Bereavement"Nomi Stone: "Waiting for Happiness"Robert Duncan: "A Little Language"Pattiann Rogers, "Finding the Cat in a Spring Field at Midnight"William Matthews, "Loyal"Christopher Smart, "from Jubilate Agno (for I will consider my cat Joffrey...)"The Humane Society suggests a few coping strategies for dealing with the loss of a loved pet:Acknowledge your grief and give yourself permission to express it.Don't hesitate to reach out to others who can lend a sympathetic ear. Do a little research online and you'll find hundreds of resources and support groups that may be helpful to you.Write about your feelings, either in a journal or a poem, essay, or short story.Call your veterinarian or local humane society to see whether they offer a pet-loss support group or hotline, or can refer you to one.Prepare a memorial for your pet.

We catch up and talk about some music gear and other things check it out!

Steamboat Captains for Belle of Louisville and Belle of Cincinnati

Mark Doty, award-winning poet and essayist, speaking about his work and the importance of writing in our lives, in anticipation of a visit to King's College in Wilkes-Barre, on Thursday, March 24, 2022, hosted by the English Department's Visiting Writers Program. Doty will teach an afternoon workshop for students, and at 7:30 that evening, he will present a poetry reading and question-and-answer session. A book signing will follow. The reading is free and open to the public in Burke Auditorium on the first floor of the McGowan School of Business on the campus. For information: www.kings.edu; And for more about Mark Doty, www.blueflowerarts.com/artist/mark-doty

Mark Doty reading at the Unamuno Author Festival. The festival took place in May of 2019 in Madrid, Spain. This reading was recorded at Desperate Literature, an independent bookstore in Madrid. Doty has won the National Book Award for his 2008 collection "Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems." He was also the first American poet to win the T.S. Elliot prize. In addition to his poems, Doty has written several glowingly reviewed and much-awarded memoirs including "Heaven's Coast" and "Firebird" and the NYTimes best seller, "Dog Years." This reading was recorded almost one year to the day before the killing of George Floyd, and ends with a poem Doty wrote reflecting on the death of Tamir Rice, a twelve year old black boy shot and killed by the police while paying with a toy gun. You'll hear the rawness of the emotion behind the poem in his reading. SUBMIT TO THE OPEN MIC OF THE AIR! www.poetryspokenhere.com/open-mic-of-the-air Visit our website: www.poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com

James challenges Aaron to a game of Linda, Linda, Lynda, and we revisit Mark Doty's poem "Homo Will Not Inherit," and we delve into the poetry-world homophobia that Doty's poem critiques.Buy books by authors we've mentioned at Loyalty Bookstore!Linda GreggLinda Gregg was born on Sept. 9, 1942 (Virgo); she died on March 20, 2019.  Her books includeAll of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (2008); In the Middle Distance (2006); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Chosen by the Lion (1995); Sacraments of Desire (1992); Alma (1985); and Too Bright to See (1981).Read "The Lamb" here.Linda Gregerson was born August 5, 1950 (Leo). She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014, The Selvage (2012), Waterborne (2002), and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996). As well as a writer, Gregerson is a Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor, and a devotee of the sciences.You can read the poem James references here.Lynda Hull was born on Dec. 5, 1954 (Sagittarius). Her collections include Ghost Money (1986),  Star Ledger (1991), and The Only World: Poems, published posthumously in 1995 and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In 2006, Graywolf Press published her Collected Poems, edited by David Wojahn.You can read the poem in the game here.Read "Homo Will Not Inherit" from Mark Doty's book Atlantis (1995) here.In a review of Mark Doty's Source, Logan writes:"[Mark Doty is] a poet with a gift for description, a taste for winsome subjects, an addiction to images of light (less now than in earlier books), and a narcissism all his own.[...]If you hug every tree on the lot, if you love everything you see (Doty could make a garbage can a thing of beauty), isn't it hard to tell one thing from another? You're just the sum of your gincrack, greeting-card sentimentality.[...]Doty's so busy preening, he falls victim to hilarious verbal blunders.[...]If you hired [Doty] to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace. Such cheap profusion, such indulgent excess, is no better than cloying conceit. You get a hint of Doty's deeper wounds, of compromised fragility and sad vulnerability, then he lights up his lines like Vegas and tries to sell you tickets to the floor show."--the text of the review was published in the New Criterion in December 2002, and then reprinted in a chapter titled "Verse Chronicle: The Real Language of Men" in Logan's book The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press, 2005). 

This week, we're continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Vincent Virga—author of the Gaywyck trilogy, the first m/m gothic romance, and one of the first m/m romances ending with a happily ever after. He talks about writing gay romance and about the way reading about love and happiness change readers lives. He also shares rich, wonderful stories about his vibrant life as a picture editor in publishing, about the literary set in New York City in the 70s and 80s, about writing during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, about the times in a writer's life when the words don't come easily, and about the times when they can't be stopped. We are honored and so grateful that Vincent took the time to speak with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. There's still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus. Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful! Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.Show NotesWelcome Vincent Virga, author of Gaywyck, the first gay gothic romance, and one of the earliest gay romances with a happily ever after. It was published by Avon in 1980. He has written several other novels, including Vadriel Vail and A Comfortable Corner. He was also the premier picture editor in the book industry. He has been with his partner, author James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, for 56 years. Their collected papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Today is the 41st anniversary of The Ramrod Massacre in New York City, where Vernon Kroening and Jorg Wenz were killed. Six other men were shot and injured inside the bar or on the streets near the Ramrod. Author Malinda Lo and Librarian Angie Manfredi sound the warning bell about the fights that we are facing around access to books and libraries and calls for book banning happening all around the country. Here is what you can do to help support your local library. Check out Runforsomething.net for ideas about local races where you live. Want more Vincent in your life? Here is a great interview from 2019 on a blog called The Last Bohemians, and this 2011 interview on Live Journal. Daisy Buchanan cries that she's never seen such beautiful shirts in The Great Gatsby, and We Get Lettersis a song from the Perry Como show.People Vincent mentioned: Susan Sontag, Maria Callas, opera singer Victoria de los Ángeles, editor Elaine Markson, Jane Fonda, Armistead Maupin, poets John Ashbery and James Merrill, Hillary and Bill Clinton, editor Alice Mayhew, Gwen Edelman at Avon Books, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, publisher Bob Wyatt, John Ehrlichman from Watergate, author Colm Tóibín, poet Mark Doty, Truman Capote, poet and translator Richard Howard, Shelley Winters, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Novak. The museum Vincent was a part of in County Mayo, Ireland, is The Jackie Clarke Collection.The twisty turny secret book that made him a lover of Gothics was Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Vincent is also a lover of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Bellamann's King's Row.A few short pieces abaout the AIDS epidemic: the impact of the epidemic on survivors in the queer community, and how the American government ignored the crisis.

About the Book:Deborah A. Lott grew up in a Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s, under the sway of her outrageously eccentric father. A lay rabbi who enjoyed dressing up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, he taught her how to have fun. But he also taught her to fear germs, other children, and contamination from the world at large. Deborah was so deeply bonded to her father and his peculiar worldview that when he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him.Sanity is not always a choice, but for sixteen-year-old Deborah, lines had to be drawn between reality and her own “overactive imagination.” She saved herself through an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, a deeply awkward sexual awakening, and entry into the world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign.After attending Kennedy's last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, Deborah would come to a new reckoning with loss. Ultimately, she would find her own path, and her own way of turning grief into love.About Deborah:Deborah A. Lott is a writer, editor, and college instructor. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely. Her work has been thrice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.Her book, Don't Go Crazy Without Me has been acclaimed by writers Mark Doty, Abigail Thomas, Paul Lisicky, Karen E. Bender, Hope Edelman, among others. She is also the author of the book In Session: the Bond between Women and Their Therapists, which was widely praised for its unprecedented look at boundary and transference dilemmas in psychotherapy. Lott surveyed and interviewed several hundred women in gathering the research for that work. The book continues to be used to train psychotherapists nationwide and appears on multiple consumer websites as one of the top books ever written about the psychotherapy relationship.Lott serves as a faculty member at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and literature courses, and serves as Editor to Two Hawks Quarterly. Among other courses, she has developed The Trauma Memoir, Lolita and Her Literary Sisters, and Representations of Childhood in Literature.As an independent editor, Lott has worked with a number of published authors developing articles, web content, books, academic monographs, and other materialFollow Deborah:Twitter: @deborahlott8FacebookWebsiteFollow TSatS:Twitter: @SituationStoryIG: @situationandstoryFacebook--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/appSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/situationandstory/support Get full access to situation / story at situationstory.substack.com/subscribe

Nowadays, a lot of people don't like their jobs. And quitting is more tempting every time you have a bad day at work. Should you quit your job to be a full-time real estate investor? Well, today, JD and Melissa, with their guest Mark Doty, will talk about when is the best time to make the leap to full-time real estate investor and how taking action and coming up with a plan can put you on the path to success really quickly! Stay tuned!   Here's what to expect on the podcast: How did Mark change his career and his transition into real estate? Reasons why you should consider real estate investing. A GREAT investment option! Team up with someone who will bring knowledge and skills that you may be lacking. Overcoming the fear of making offers. Why it is important to create an effective partnership with builders? Determine the highest and best use of a property. Finding more value! And much more!   About Mark Doty: Mark recently quit a multiple six-figure career in medical device sales to focus full-time on his new real estate venture in San Diego. He had this passion project on the side for years and is now working on it full-time!   His model is to find single-family houses on multifamily lots. He entitles the units to the city development office, builds additional apartments, and then refinance, pays back investors, and holds long-term for cash flow.   Reach out if you're curious about investing passively or helping identify distressed properties!   Connect with Mark! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.doty.355 Contact #: 858-204-2510 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2Fxbpnjqpjxw-UZpo6Ddg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-doty-1a0a127/   Connect with JD and Melissa! Website: https://therealestatejam.com/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealestatejam/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealestatejam/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa_CWAV1OvH81yp6fITB4lg Shorefront Investments: https://shorefront-investments.com/  Email: therealestatejam@gmail.com  

Mark Doty decided to get into real estate investing a couple years ago.His first deal was… interesting.It went way over budget. A lot of things went wrong.But he still made good money on it.Here's the whole story, plus some advice, lessons learned, and “mindset” wisdom for anyone who's starting out in real estate investing…Listen in now!Get Your Ticket to Flip Hacking LIVE 2021...Mark is a 7 Figure Runway member.He joined Runway at Flip Hacking LIVE last year (and when you hear why he joined and what he was thinking at the time, it might surprise you… he talks about it in this episode).Flip Hacking LIVE is happening October 14-16 this year.We're going to be meeting IN-PERSON in Orlando, FL!If you're ready to “get serious” about this real estate thing……you're invited to join us.Hit the link below to learn more and sign up!CLICK HERE to Sign Up for Flip Hacking LIVE 2021 >>Catch you on the flip side!Links and ResourcesFlip Hacking LIVE tickets for October 2021 are available now… and seats are filling up fast. If you want to learn the exact systems and strategies the nation's top house flippers and wholesalers are using to flip 100s of houses per year, reserve your spot today. Hit the link below to sign up!- CLICK HERE: FlipHackingLIVE.comIf you're an experienced real estate investor and you're ready to get around a community of active house flippers and wholesalers who will support you, hold you accountable, and push you to set goals that inspire you as you grow your business, check out 7 Figure Altitude and see if it looks like a good fit. If it is, I invite you to fill out a quick application to join. If you have any questions, reach out!- CLICK HERE: 7FigureAltitude.com====================Want to continue your house flipping / wholesaling journey? Here are a few more resources to check out...Subscribe: Join the 7 Figure Flipping email list to get the latest house flipping and wholesaling secrets, plus insider access to real estate investing tips, training, and more! Click Here: https://7figureflipping.com/subscribe7 Figure Flipping Podcast: Subscribe and get more episodes like this one delivered to you every week! Click Here: https://7figureflipping.com/listenFacebook Group: We've built a community of serious investors who are learning and growing their businesses together. Join the Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fliphacking/7FigureFlipping.com: Learn more about who we are, our mentoring groups, upcoming events, and the causes we support at our website. Plus, grab some free downloads and other materials to help you on your real estate investing journey! Click Here: https://7figureflipping.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sermon given by guest preacher Rev. Mark Doty   www.laurelheights.org  

I finally caught up with my old friend and guitar slinger Mark Doty enjoy.

Fran Lock has a wonderful virtual sit-down with Alan Humm, founder and editor of One Hand Clapping,  a free online magazine that attempts to help new, under-represented and unpublished authors, as well as artists, musicians and composers, by featuring them in the same pages as those who are more established.  Alan is a writer and a teacher of English who has just completed his first collection, the intriguingly titled: A Brief and Biased History of Love.  He is also the editor and founder of One Hand Clapping Magazine, which began its online life last year, but which published a single glorious print version three years prior, and we're going to talk about that and about the transition from print to digital a little later on. So far, we have been lucky enough to feature work by Ali Smith, Les Murray, Hilary Mantel, Lydia Davis, Mark Doty, Colm Toibin, Paul Muldoon, John Burnside, Gillian Clarke, David Harsent, Martin Parr, and many others alongside our less-well-known contributors. They've managed to build a readership to be proud of.  https://www.1handclapping.online/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/socialyetdistanced/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/socialyetdistanced/support

Derek Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is a co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. His awards include a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives with his family on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org. Find more here: https://www.dereksheffield.com/ As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is arguably one of the most famous poems in the English language. Write a poem that imagines a scenario in which the speaker takes the road more traveled. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem about one or more of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope, then becomes an audio podcast.

In this time of Covid, and maybe in all times of human existence, we experience these great emotions of love and grief. And we have only one way to explain them: in storytelling. But there's a deep problem here: we can't experience them in the same way we try to explain them. We can't tell our way out of the fundamental emotions of the human experience. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take an in-depth look at Mark Doty's gorgeous poem about grief and loss, "The Embrace." It's one of the most honest, heart-felt revelations about loss I've ever read on this podcast.

To support our work and listen to additional content from previous episodes, see here: https://patreon.com/yourshelf and follow us on social media @_yourshelf_ (note: there is no Patreon episode for either of our Books of the Year 2020 episodes). In our latest, tenth episode of The YourShelf Podcast, Poetry Book of the Year 2020, our chief curator Juliano Zaffino (Jay) catches up with Seán Hewitt to discuss Seán's book Tongues of Fire, the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hewitt's forthcoming memoir (due 2022), and a recap of the best books of 2020. For full show notes, see here: https://podcast.yourshelf.uk/episodes/10. Thanks for listening.LinksPatreonInstagramTwitterPodcastYourShelfEpisode NotesJay asks Seán about what book world he would live in, what his bookshelves look like, and who he'd invite to a literary dinner party. (from 0:01)Seán explains the origins of his book Tongues of Fire, his pamphlet Lantern, the scope of nature poetry, timeliness vs timelessness, the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and more. (from 9:20)Seán recaps his favourite books, albums and TV shows of 2020, recommends some titles for 2021, and hints at his forthcoming memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, due out 2022. (from 44:50)Seán Hewitt gives a special reading of Jay's favourite poem in Tongues of Fire, 'Adoratrion'. (from 1:01:03)The books and authors discussed in this episode include: Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the works of Flann O'Brien, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe and William Blake, Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure, Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird, Alice Oswald's Dart, Freya Daly Sadgrove's Head Girl, Mark Doty's My Alexandria, Wayne Holloway-Smith's Love After Love, and the works of Ocean Vuong, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Karin Boye and J.M. Synge.Seán's 2020 highlights include Claudia Rankine's Just Us, Hilary Fannin's The Weight of Love, Rachel Long's My Darling From The Lions, Eavan Boland's The Historians, Robin Robertson's Grimoire, Jane Mead's World of Made and Unmade, and Caleb Femi's Poor. Aside from books, Seán's other 2020 highlights include the albums What's Your Pleasure? by Jessie Ware and Roísín Machine by Roísín Murphy, the TV shows Schitt's Creek and The Crown, and playing the Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.Seán's most anticipated releases of 2021 include Niven Govinden's Diary of a Film, Jackie Kay's Bessie Smith, Andrew McMillan's Pandemonium, Kayo Chingonyi's A Blood Condition, and Jen Hadfield's The Stone Age.Seán's book Tongues of Fire is available now from Jonathan Cape. His academic volume J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism is available from Oxford University Press, 7 January 2021.Thanks for listening and tune in again very soon for our second Book of the Year episode, with Doireann Ní Ghríofa!

A show devoted to extraordinary poet, essayist, and memoirist Mark Doty, who discusses dogs in his life and reads passages from his exquisite book Dog Years

Esteemed poet Mark Doty discusses his work, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2008 National Book Awards, and his 2013 book-length poem and meditative bestiary called A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Co...

Brooke Matson is a poet and book artist in Spokane, Washington, where she is the executive director of Spark Central , a non-profit dedicated to igniting creativity, innovation, and imagination. Eight years of teaching and mentoring at-risk youth deepened her study of physical science and the psychological effects of violence and loss. Matson's second collection of poetry, In Accelerated Silence , was selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize and has just been published by Milkweed Editions.

Steven Sanchez’s debut book, Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), was selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. A CantoMundo Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, and winner of the inaugural García Lorca Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared or will appear in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Nimrod, and elsewhere.  

For this Christmas week, Danielle introduces Max to Mark Doty's Visitation. Talking points include the holidays, the Christmas Whale, and complicated joy.

  To celebrate the launch of Steven Sanchez’s first full-length poetry book, Phantom Tongue, Mike sits down with Steven, Michelle Brittan Rosado, and Mathieu Cailler to talk about the process of putting a book together, how one manages to keep making love poems interesting, the power of persona poems and so much more! Mathieu Cailler’s poetry and prose have been widely featured in numerous national and international publications, including the Los Angeles Times and The Saturday Evening Post. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he is the recipient of a Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and a Shakespeare Award for Poetry. He is the author of Clotheslines (Red Bird Press), Shhh (ELJ Publications), and Loss Angeles (Short Story America Press), which has been honored by the Hollywood, New York, London, Paris, Best Book, and International Book Awards. His newest book, May I Have This Dance? (About Editions), was recently named poetry winner of the New England Book Festival. Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2018. Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, was the winner of the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize, and Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, and The New Yorker. Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue, selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award (Sundress Publications, 2018). He is also the author of two chapbooks: To My Body (Glass Poetry Press, 2016) and Photographs of Our Shadows (Agape Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Crab Creek Review, Muzzle, and Tinderbox. Writers’ Block Live! is recorded at the 1888 Center in Orange, California.     1888 Center programs are recorded and archived as a free educational resource on our website or with your favorite podcast app including Apple and Spotify. Each interdisciplinary episode is designed to provide a unique platform for industry innovators to share stories about art, literature, music, history, science, or technology. Produced in partnership with Brew Sessions. Producer and Host: Mike Gravagno Producers: Jon-Barrett Ingels and Kevin Staniec Manager: Sarah Becker Guests: Mathieu Cailler, Michelle Brittan Rosado, and Steven Sanchez Audio: Brew Sessions Live

You Inside Me by Tori Curtis   It'll be fun, he'd said. Everyone's doing it. You don't have to be looking for romance, it's just a good way to meet people. "I don't think it's about romance at all," Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. "I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he'd have to resign." "That's 'cause we've never had a vampire congressman," Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. "Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light."     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 57 for May 21st, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service. If you're looking for more queer science fiction to listen to, there's a full audio book available of the Lightspeed Magazine "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" special issue, featuring stories by a large number of queer authors, including  John Chu, Chaz Brenchley, Rose Lemberg, and many others. To download a free audiobook today, go to http://www.audibletrial.com/GlitterShip and choose an excellent book to listen to, whether that’s "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" or something else entirely. Today I have a story and a poem for you. The poem is "Dionysus in London" by Tristan Beiter. Tristan Beiter is a student at Swarthmore College studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He loves reading poetry and speculative fiction, some of his favorite books being The Waste Land, HD’s Trilogy, Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found crafting absurdities with his boyfriend or yelling about literary theory.   Dionysus in London by Tristan Beiter   The day exploded, you know. Last night a womanwith big bouffant hair toldme, “Show me a storywhere the daughter runs into a stopsign and it literally turns into a white flower.” I fail to describea total eclipse and the throneof petrified wood sankinto the lakebed. James made love to Buckinghamwhile I pulled the honeysuckleto me, made a flower crown forthe leopards flanking mewhile I watched redand white invert themselves, whitepetals pushing from the center of the signas the post wilted until allthat remained was a giant lotuson the storm grate waitingto rot or wash away. I let it stay there while the Scottishking hid behind the Scottish playand walked behind me, one eye outfor the mark left when locked in.You go witchy in there—or at leastyou—or he, or I—learn to be afraidof the big coats and brassbuttons, like the ones in every hallcloset; you never know if they will turn,like yours, into bats and bugs and gianttarantulas made from wire hangers. The woman showed meour reflections in the shop windowwhile one or the otherman in the palace polishedthe silver for his lover’s tableand asked me whoI loved; I decidedon the creamlinen, since the woolwas too close to the pea coatthat hung by your door.I suppose that the catis under the car; that’s probably where it fled toas we walked, knowingwe already found thatthe ivy in your hair was artificialas the bacchanal, or yourevasion, Sire, of the question(and of the serpents who are wellworth the welloffered to them with the wet waxon my crown). I suppose the car is under the cat,in which case it must be a very largecat, or else a very small car.I eat your teeth. I see brilliantine teeth floatingin her thick red lipstick. Jamestears apart the rhododendronchattering (about) his incisorsand remembering the fleshand—nothing so exoticas a Sphinx, maybe a dustmote or lip-marksleft on the large leather chaise.Teeth gleam from the shadowswhere I wait, thyrsusraised with the conealmost touching the roofof the forest, to drown in a peacockas it swallows (chimneyswifts?) the sun—orwas it son—or maybe it wasjust a grape I fed it soit would eat the spiderscrawling from the closet.It struts across the palace greenlike it owns the place, likeit will replace the hunting-grounds with fields of stragglingmint that the kingwould never ask for. The woman teasesup her hair before the mirror, fillingthe restroom with hairsprayand big laughs before walking backinto the restaurant, where wewait to make ourselvesover—the way the throne didwhen the wood crumbled under thepressure of an untold story,leaving nothing but crystals and dust. We argued for an hour overwhether to mix leaves andflowers, plants and gems,before settling on fourcrowns, one for each of us. Her hair mostly covers hers.The cats will love it though,playing with teeththat were knocked into your winein the barfight (why did youorder wine in a placelike that, Buck?) and yougot replaced with gold, like Iwear woven in my braidsas the sun sets on the daughterthat, unsurprisingly, noneof us have. But if we did, she would turn yieldsigns into dahlias andthat would be the signto move on with the leopardsand their flashing teeth andbrass eyes and listen.To the walls and rivers,to the sculpture that is farwhiter than me falling. Andto the peacock which has justeaten another bug so you don’t have tokill it. Get yourself a dresserand cover it with white enamelit’ll hold up, and no insectslive in dressers. Keep the ivy and the pineconein a mother-of-pearl trinket boxwith your plastic volumizing hairinserts and jeweled combs.And put a cat and dolphinon it, to remember.     Next, our short story this episode is "You Inside Me" by Tori Curtis Tori Curtis writes speculative fiction with a focus on LGBT and disability issues. She is the author of one novel, Eelgrass, and a handful of short stories. You can find her at toricurtiswrites.com and on Twitter at @tcurtfish, where she primarily tweets about how perfect her wife is. CW: For descriptions of traumatic surgery.       You Inside Me by Tori Curtis   It'll be fun, he'd said. Everyone's doing it. You don't have to be looking for romance, it's just a good way to meet people. "I don't think it's about romance at all," Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. "I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he'd have to resign." "That's 'cause we've never had a vampire congressman," Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. "Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light." He took fifteen minutes to edit her photos ("they'll expect you to use a filter, so you might as well,") and pop the best ones on her profile. Suckr: the premier dating app for vampires and their fanciers. "It's like we're cats," she said. "I heard you like cats," he agreed, and she sighed.     Hi, I'm Sabella. I've been a vampire since I was six years old, and I do not want to see or be seen by humans. I'm excited to meet men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. "That's way too big of an age range," Dedrick said. "You want to be compatible with these people." "Yeah, compatible. Like my tissue type." "You don't want to end up flirting with a grandpa." I'm excited to meet men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. I'm most proud of my master's degree. You should message me if you're brave and crazy.     It took days, not to mention Dedrick’s exasperated return, before she went back on Suckr. She paced up the beautiful wood floors of her apartment, turning on heel at the sole window on the long end and the painted-over cast-iron radiator on the short. When she felt too sick to take care of herself, her mom came over and put Rumors on, wrapped her in scarves that were more pretty than functional, warmed some blood and gave it to her in a sippy cup. Sabella remembered nothing so much as the big Slurpees her mom had bought her, just this bright red, when she’d had strep the last year she was human. She wore the necklace Dedrick had given her every day. It was a gold slice of pepperoni pizza with “best” emblazoned on the back (his matched, but read “friends,”), and she fondled it like a hangnail. She rubbed the bruises on her arms, where the skin had once been clear and she'd once thought herself pretty in a plain way, like Elinor Dashwood, as though she might be able to brush off the dirt. She called her daysleeper friends, texted acquaintances, and slowly stopped responding to their messages as she realized how bored she was of presenting hope day after day.     2:19:08 bkissedrose: I'm so sorry. 2:19:21 bkissedrose: I feel like such a douche 2:19:24 sabellasay: ??? 2:20:04 sabellasay: what r u talkin about 2:25:56 bkissedrose: u talked me down all those times I would've just died 2:26:08 sabellasay: it was rly nbd 2:26:27 bkissedrose: I've never been half as good as you are 2:26:48 bkissedrose: and now you're so sick 2:29:12 sabellasay: dude stop acting like i'm dying 2:29:45 sabellasay: I can't stand it 2:30:13 bkissedrose: god you're so brave   (sabellasay has become inactive)     "Everyone keeps calling me saying you stopped talking to them," Dedrick said when he made it back to her place, shoes up on the couch now that he'd finally wiped them of mud. "Should I feel lucky you let me in?" "I'm tired," she said. "It's supposed to be a symptom. I like this one, I think she has potential." He took her phone and considered it with the weight of a father researching a car seat. "A perfect date: I take you for a ride around the lake on my bike, then we stop home for an evening snack." "She means her motorcycle," Sabella clarified. He rolled his eyes and continued reading. "My worst fear: commitment." "At least she's honest." "That's not really a good thing. You're not looking for someone to skip out halfway through the movie." "No, I'm looking for someone who's not going to be heartbroken when I die anyway." Dedrick sighed, all the air going out of his chest as it might escape from dough kneaded too firmly, and held her close to him. "You're stupid," he told her, "but so sweet." "I think I'm going to send her a nip."     The girl was named Ash but she spelled it A-I-S-L-I-N-G, and she seemed pleased that Sabella knew enough not to ask lots of stupid questions. They met in a park by the lakeside, far enough from the playground that none of the parents would notice the fanged flirtation going on below. If Aisling had been a boy, she would have been a teen heartthrob. She wore her hair long where it was slicked back and short (touchable, but hard to grab in a fight) everywhere else. She wore a leather jacket that spoke of a once-in-a-lifetime thrift store find, and over the warmth of her blood and her breath she smelled like bag balm. Sabella wanted to hide in her arms from a fire. She wanted to watch her drown trying to save her. Aisling parked her motorcycle and stowed her helmet before coming over to say hi—gentlemanly, Sabella thought, to give her a chance to prepare herself. “What kind of scoundrel left you to wait all alone?” Aisling asked, with the sort of effortlessly cool smile that might have broken a lesser woman’s heart. “I don’t know,” Sabella said, “but I’m glad you’re here now.” Aisling stepped just inside her personal space and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but are you—" “I’m trans, yes,” Sabella interrupted, and smiled so wide she could feel the tension at her temples. Like doing sit-ups the wrong way for years, having this conversation so many times hadn’t made it comfortable, only routine. “We don’t need to be awkward about it.” “Okay,” Aisling agreed, and sat on the bench, helping Sabella down with a hand on her elbow. “I meant that you seem sick.” She looked uneasy, and Sabella sensed that she had never been human. Vampires didn’t get sick—she had probably never had more than a headache, and that only from hunger. “Yes,” Sabella said. “I am sick. I’m not actually—I mentioned this on my profile—I’m not actually looking for love.” “I hope you won’t be too disappointed when it finds you,” Aisling said, and Sabella blushed, reoriented herself with a force like setting a bone, like if she tried hard enough to move in one direction she’d stop feeling like a spinning top. “I’m looking for a donor,” she said. “Yeah, all right,” Aisling said. She threw her arm over the back of the bench so that Sabella felt folded into her embrace. “I’m always willing to help a pretty girl out.” “I don’t just mean your blood,” she said, and felt herself dizzy.     It was easier for Sabella to convince someone to do something than it was for her to ask for it. Her therapist had told her that, and even said it was common, but he hadn’t said how to fix it. “Please, may I have your liver” was too much to ask, and “Please, I don’t want to die” was a poor argument. “So, you would take my liver—" “It would actually only be part of your liver,” Sabella said, stopping to catch her breath. She hadn’t been able to go hiking since she’d gotten so sick—she needed company, and easy trails, and her friends either didn’t want to go or, like her mom, thought it was depressing to watch her climb a hill and have to stop to spit up bile. “So we would each have half my liver, in the end.” Sabella shrugged and looked into the dark underbrush. If she couldn’t be ethical about this, she wouldn’t deserve a liver. She wouldn’t try to convince Aisling until she understood the facts. “In humans, livers will regenerate once you cut them in half and transplant them. Like how kids think if you cut an earthworm in half, you get two. Or like bulbs. Ideally, it would go like that.” “And if it didn’t go ideally?” (“Turn me,” Dedrick said one day, impulsively, when she’d been up all night with a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, holding her in his lap with his shirt growing polka-dotted. “I’ll be a vampire in a few days, we can have the surgery—you’ll be cured in a week.”) “If it doesn’t go ideally,” Sabella said, “one or both of us dies. If it goes poorly, I don’t even know what happens.” She stepped off the tree and set her next target, a curve in the trail where a tree had fallen and the light shone down on the path. Normally these days she didn’t wear shoes but flip-flops, but this was a date, and she’d pulled her old rainbow chucks out of the closet. Aisling walked with her silently, keeping pace, and put an arm around her waist. Sabella looked up and down the trail. Green Lake was normally populated enough that people kept to their own business, and these days she felt pretty safe going about, even with a girl. But she checked anyway before she leaned into Ais’s strength, letting her guide them so that she could use all her energy to keep moving. “But if it doesn’t happen at all, you die no matter what?” Sabella took a breath. “If you don’t want to, I look for someone else.”     Her mom was waiting for her when Sabella got home the next morning. Sabella’s mother was naturally blonde, tough when she needed to be, the sort of woman who could get into hours-long conversations with state fair tchotchke vendors. She’d gotten Sabella through high school and into college through a careful application of stamping and yelling. When Sabella had started calling herself Ravynn, she’d brought a stack of baby name books home and said, “All right, let’s find you something you can put on a resume.” “Mom,” she said, but smiling, “I gave you a key in case I couldn’t get out of bed, not so you could check if I spent the night with a date.” “How’d it go? Was this the girl Dedrick helped you find?” “Aisling, yeah,” Sabella said. She sat on the recliner, a mountain of accent pillows cushioning her tender body. “It was good. I like her a lot.” “Did she decide to get the surgery?” “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her to choose.” “Then what did you two do all night?” Sabella frowned. “I like her a lot. We had a good time.” Her mom stood and put the kettle on, and Sabella couldn’t help thinking what an inconvenience she was, that her mother couldn’t fret over her by making toast and a cup of tea. “Christ, what decent person would want to do that with you?” “We have chemistry! She’s very charming!” She examined Sabella with the dissatisfied air of an artist. “You’re a mess, honey. You’re so orange you could be a jack-o-lantern, and swollen all over. You look like you barely survived a dogfight. I don’t even see my daughter when I look at you anymore.” Sabella tried to pull herself together, to look more dignified, but instead she slouched further into the recliner and crossed her arms over her chest. “Maybe she thinks I’m funny, or smart.” “Maybe she’s taking advantage. Anyone who really cared about you wouldn’t be turned on, they’d be worried about your health.” Sabella remembered the look on Aisling’s face when she’d first come close enough to smell her, and shuddered. “I’m not going to ask her to cut out part of her body for me without thinking about it first,” she said. “Without giving her something in return?" her mom asked. "It's less than two pounds." “But it’s still her choice,” Sabella said. “I’m starting to wonder if you even want to live,” her mom said, and left. Sabella found the energy to go turn off the stovetop before she fell asleep. (Her mother had raised her responsible.)     12:48:51 bkissedrose: what happens to a dream bestowed 12:49:03 bkissedrose: upon a girl too weak to fight for it? 12:53:15 sabellasay: haha you can’t sleep either? 12:53:38 sabellasay: babe idk 12:55:43 sabellasay: is it better to have loved and lost 12:56:29 sabellasay: than to die a virgin? 1:00:18 bkissedrose: I guess I don’t know 1:01:24 bkissedrose: maybe it depends if they're good     “It’s nice here,” Aisling confessed the third time they visited the lake. Sabella and her mom weren’t talking, but she couldn’t imagine it would last more than a few days longer, so she wasn’t worried. “I’d never even heard of it.” “I grew up around here,” Sabella said, “and I used to take my students a few times a year." “You teach?” “I used to teach,” she said, and stepped off the trail—the shores were made up of a gritty white sand like broken shells—to watch the sinking sun glint off the water. “Seventh grade science.” Aisling laughed. “That sounds like a nightmare.” “I like that they’re old enough you can do real projects with them, but before it breaks off into—you know, are we doing geology or biology or physics. When you’re in seventh grade, everything is science.” She smiled and closed her eyes so that she could feel the wind and the sand under her shoes. She could hear birds settling and starting to wake, but she couldn’t place them. “They’ve got a long-term sub now. Theoretically, if I manage to not die, I get my job back.” Aisling came up behind her and put her arms around her. Sabella knew she hadn’t really been weaving—she knew her limits well enough now, she hoped—but she felt steadier that way. “You don’t sound convinced.” “I don’t think they expect to have to follow through,” Sabella admitted. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who ever thinks I’m going to survive this. My mom’s so scared all the time, I know she doesn’t.” Aisling held her not tight but close, like being tucked into a bright clean comforter on a cool summer afternoon. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, her face up against Sabella’s neck so that every part of Sabella wanted her to bite. “Maybe,” she said, then thought better of it. “Yes.” “How’d you get sick? I didn’t think we could catch things like that. Or was it while you were human?” “Um, no, but I’m not contagious, just nasty.” Aisling laughed, and she continued, encouraged. “Mom would, you know, once I came out I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, but she wouldn’t let me get any kind of reconstructive surgery until I was eighteen. She thought it was creepy, some doc getting his hands all over her teenage kid.” “Probably fair.” “So I’m eighteen, and she says okay, you’re right, you got good grades in school and you’re going to college like I asked, I'll pay for whatever surgery you want. And you have to imagine, I just scheduled my freshman orientation, I have priorities." "Which are?" "Getting laid, mostly." “Yeah, I remember that.” “So I’m eighteen and hardly ever been kissed, I’m not worried about the details. I don’t let my mom come with me, it doesn’t even occur to me to see a doctor who’s worked with vampires before, I just want to look like Audrey Hepburn's voluptuous sister.” “Oh no,” Ash said. It hung there for a moment, the dread and Sabella’s not being able to regret that she’d been so stupid. “It must have come up.” “Sure. He said he was pretty sure it would be possible to do the surgery on a vampire, he knew other surgeries had been done. I was just so excited he didn’t say no.” Ash held her tight then, like she might be dragged away otherwise, and Sabella knew that it had nothing to do with her in particular, that it was only the protective instinct of one person watching another live out her most plausible nightmare. “What did he do to you?” “It wasn’t his fault,” she said, and then—grimacing, she knew her mother would have been so angry with her—“at least, he didn’t mean anything by it. He never read anything about how to adapt the procedure to meet my needs.” She sounded so clinical, like she’d imbibed so many doctors’ explanations of what had happened that she was drunk on it. “But neither did I. We both found out you can’t give vampires a blood transfusion.” "Why would you need to?" She shrugged. "You don't, usually, in plastic surgery." "No," Aisling interrupted, "I mean, why wouldn't you drink it?" Sabella tried to remember, or tried not to be able to, and tucked her cold hands into her pockets. "You're human, I guess. Anyway, I puked all over him and the incision sites, had to be hospitalized. My doctor says I'm lucky I'm such a good healer, or I'd need new boobs and a new liver." They were both quiet, and Sabella thought, this is it. You either decide it's too much or you kiss me again. She thought, I miss getting stoned with friends and telling shitty surgery stories and listening to them laugh. I hate that when I meet girls their getting-to-know-you involves their Youtube make-up tutorials and mine involves "and then, after they took the catheter out..." "Did you sue for malpractice, at least?" Ash asked, and Sabella couldn't tell without looking if her tone was teasing or wistful. "My mom did, yeah. When they still wanted her to pay for the damn surgery."     Aisling pulled up to the front of Sabella's building and stopped just in front of her driveway. She kicked her bike into park and stepped onto the sidewalk, helping Sabella off and over the curbside puddle. Sabella couldn't find words for what she was thinking, she was so afraid that her feelings would shatter as they crystallized. She wanted Ais to brush her hair back from her face and comb out the knots with her fingers. She wanted Ais to stop by to shovel the drive when there was lake effect snow. She wanted to find 'how to minimize jaundice' in the search history of Aisling's phone. “You’re beautiful in the sunlight,” Ais said, breaking her thoughts, maybe on purpose. “Like you were made to be outside.” Sabella ducked her head and leaned up against her. The date was supposed to be over, go inside and let this poor woman get on with her life, but she didn’t want to leave. “It’s nice to have someone to go with me,” she said. “Especially with a frost in the air. Sometimes people act like I’m so fragile.” “Ridiculous. You’re a vampire.” Her ears were cold, and she pressed them against Aisling’s jawbone. She wondered what the people driving past thought when they saw them. She thought that maybe the only thing better than surviving would be to die a tragic death, loved and loyally attended. “I was born human.” “Even God makes mistakes.” Sabella smiled. “Is that what I am? A mistake?” “Nah,” she said. “Just a happy accident.” Sabella laughed, thought you're such a stoner and I feel so safe when you look at me like that. "I'll do it," Ais said.  "What do I have to do to set up the surgery?" Sabella hugged her tight, hid against her and counted the seconds—one, two, three, four, five—while Ais didn't change her mind and Sabella wondered if she would.     "I have to stress how potentially dangerous this is," Dr. Young said. "I can't guarantee that it will work, that either of you will survive the procedure or the recovery, or that you won't ultimately regret it." Aisling was holding it together remarkably well, Sabella thought, but she still felt like she could catch her avoiding eye contact. Sabella had taken the seat in the doctor's office between her mother and girlfriend, and felt uncomfortable and strange no matter which of their hands she held. "Um," Ais said, and Sabella could feel her mother's judgment at her incoherence, "you said you wouldn't be able to do anything for the pain?" To her credit, the doctor didn't fidget or look away. Sabella, having been on the verge of death long enough to become something of a content expert, believed that it was important to have a doctor who was upfront about how terrible her life was. "I wouldn't describe it as 'nothing,' exactly," she said. "There aren't any anesthetics known to work on vampires, but we'll make you as comfortable as possible. You can feed immediately before and as soon as you're done, and that will probably help snow you over." "Being a little blood high," Ais clarified. "While you cut out my liver." "Yes." Sabella wanted to apologize. She couldn't find the words. Aisling said, "Well, while we're trying to make me comfortable, can I smoke up, too?" Dr. Young laughed. It wasn't cruel, but it wasn't promising, either. "That's not a terrible idea," she said, "but marijuana increases bleeding, and there are so many unknown variables here that I'd like to stick to best practices if we can." "I can just—" Sabella said, and choked. She wasn't sure when she'd started crying. "Find someone else. Dedrick will do it, I know." Aisling considered this. The room was quiet, soft echoes on the peeling tile floor. Sabella's mother put an arm around her, and she felt tiny, but in the way that made her feel ashamed and not protected. Aisling said, "Why are you asking me? Is there something you know that I don't?" Dr. Young shook her head. "I promise we're not misrepresenting the procedure," she said. "And theoretically, it might be possible with any vampire. But there aren't a lot of organ transplants in the literature—harvesting, sure, but not living transplants—and I want to get it right the first time. If we have a choice, I told Sabella I'd rather use a liver from a donor who was born a vampire. I think it'll increase our chance of success." "A baby'd be too weak," Aisling agreed. Her voice was going hard and theoretical. "Well, tell me something encouraging." "One of the first things we'll do is to cut through almost all of your abdominal nerves, so that will help. And there's a possibility that the experience will be so intense that you don't remember it clearly, or at all." Sabella's mother took a shaky breath, and Sabella wished, hating herself for it, that she hadn't come. Ais said, "Painful. You mean, the experience will be so painful." "If you choose to go forward with it," Dr. Young said, "we'll do everything we can to mitigate that."     Sabella had expected that Aisling would want space and patience while she decided not to die a horrible, painful death to save her. It was hard to tell how instead they ended up in her bed with the lights out, their legs wound together and their faces swollen with sleep. Sabella was shaking, and couldn’t have said why. Ais grabbed her by her seat and pulled her up close. “You said you couldn’t get me sick?” she asked. “No,” Sabella agreed. “Although my blood is probably pretty toxic.” Ais kissed her, the smell of car exhaust still stuck in her hair. “What a metaphor,” she murmured, and lifted her chin. “You look exhausted.” Sabella thought, Are you saying what I think you’re saying? and, That’s a terrible idea, and said, “God, I want to taste you.” “Well, baby,” Ais said, and her hands were on Sabella so she curled her lips and blew her hair out of her eyes, “that’s what I’m here for.” Sabella had been human once, and she remembered what food was like. The standard lie, that drinking blood was like eating a well-cooked steak, was wrong but close enough to staunch the flow of an interrogation. (She’d had friends and exes, turned as adults, who said it was like a good stout on tap, hefty and refreshing, but she thought they might just be trying to scandalize her.) Ais could have been a stalk of rhubarb or August raspberries. She moved under Sabella and held her so that their knees pressed together. She could have been the thrill of catching a fat thorny toad in among the lettuce at dusk, or a paper wasp in a butterfly net. She felt like getting tossed in the lake in January; she tasted like being wrapped in fleece and gently dried before the fire; her scent was what Sabella remembered of collapsing, limbs aquiver, on the exposed bedrock of a mountaintop, nothing but crushed pine and the warmth of a moss-bed. She woke on top of Ais, licking her wounds lazily—she wanted more, but she was too tired to do anything about it. “That’s better,” Ais whispered, and if she was disappointed that this wasn’t turning into a frenzy, she didn’t show it. They were quiet for long enough that the haze started to fade, and then Aisling said, “I couldn’t ask in front of your mother, but was it like that with your surgery? They couldn’t do anything for the pain?” Sabella shifted uncomfortably, rolled over next to Ais. “I was conscious, yes.” “Do you remember it?” It was a hard question. She wanted to say it wasn’t her place to ask. She tried to remember, and got caught up in the layers of exhaustion, the spaces between the body she’d had, the body she’d wanted, and what they had been doing to her. “Sounds and sensations and thoughts, mostly,” she said. Ais choked, and said, “So, everything,” and Sabella realized—she didn’t know how she hadn’t—how scared she must be. “No, it’s blurry,” she said instead. “I remember, um, the tugging at my chest. I kept thinking there was no way my skin wasn’t just going to split open. And the scraping sounds. They’ve got all these tools, and they’re touching you on the inside and the outside at the same time, and that’s very unsettling. And this man, I think he was the PA, standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got to calm down, honey.’” “Were you completely freaking out?” Ais asked. Sabella shook her head. Her throat hurt. “No. I mean—I cried a little. Not as much as you’d think. They said if I wasn’t careful, you know, with swallowing at the right times and breathing steady, they might mess up reshaping my larynx and I could lose my voice.” Ais swore, and Sabella wondered if she would feel angry. (Sometimes she would scream and cry, say, can you imagine doing that to an eighteen-year-old?) Right now she was just tired. “How did you manage?” “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think just, it was worth more to me to have it done than anything else. So I didn’t ever tell them to stop.”     “Please don’t go around telling people I think this is an acceptable surgical set-up,” Dr. Young said, looking around the exam room. It reminded Sabella of a public hearing, the way the stakeholders sat at opposing angles and frowned at each other. Dr. Young sat next to Dr. Park, who would be the second doctor performing the procedure. Sabella had never met Dr. Park before, and her appearance—young, mostly—didn’t inspire confidence. Sabella sat next to her mother, who held her hand and a clipboard full of potential complications. Ais crossed her fingers in her lap, sat with a nervous child’s version of polite interest. Time seemed not to blur, but to stutter, everything happening whenever. “Dr. Park,” Sabella’s mother said, “do you have any experience operating on vampires?” Dr. Park grinned and her whole mouth seemed to open up in her face, her gums pale pink as a Jolly Rancher and her left fang chipped. “Usually trauma or obstetrics,” she admitted. “Although this is nearly the same thing.” “I’m serious,” Sabella’s mom said, and Sabella interrupted. “I like her,” she said. And then—it wasn’t really a question except in the sense that there was no way anyone could be sure—“You’re not going to realize halfway through the surgery that it’s too much for you?” Dr. Park laughed. “I turned my husband when we were both eighteen,” she said as testament to her cruelty. Sabella’s mom jumped. “Jesus Christ, why?” She shrugged, languid. Ais and Dr. Young were completely calm; Ais might have had no frame of reference for what it was like to watch someone turn, and Dr. Young had probably heard this story before. “His parents didn’t like that he was dating a vampire. You’ll do crazy things for love.” Sabella could see her mother blanch even as she steadied. It wasn’t unheard of for a vampire to turn their spouse—less common now that it was easier to live as a vampire, and humans were able to date freely but not really commit. But she could remember being turned, young as she had been: the gnawing ache, the hallucinations, the thirst that had only sometimes eclipsed the pain. It was still the worst thing that she’d ever experienced, and she was sure her mother couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to do it to someone they loved. “Good,” she said. “You won’t turn back if we scream.” Dr. Young frowned. “I want you to know you have a choice,” she said. She was speaking to Ais; Sabella had a choice, too, but it was only between one death and another. “There will be a point when you can’t change your mind, but by then it’ll be almost over.” Ais swore. It made Dr. Park smile and Sabella’s mom frown. Sabella wondered if she was in love with her, or if it was impossible to be in love with someone who was growing a body for them to share. “Don’t say that,” Ais said. “I don’t want to have that choice.”     The morning of the surgery, Aisling gave Sabella a rosary to wear with her pizza necklace, and when they kicked Sabella’s mom out to the waiting room, she kissed them both as she went. “I like your mom,” Ais said shyly. They lay in cots beside each other, just close enough that they could reach out and hold hands across the gap. “I bet she’d get along with mine.” Sabella laughed, her eyes stinging, threw herself across the space between them and kissed each of Ais’s knuckles while Ais said, “Aw, c’mon, save it ‘til we get home.” “Isn’t that a lot of commitment for you?” Sabella asked. “Yeah, well,” Ais said, caught, and gave her a cheesy smile. “You’re already taking my liver, at least my heart won’t hurt so much.” They drank themselves to gorging while nurses wrapped and padded them in warm blankets. Ais was first, for whatever measure of mercy that was, and while they were wheeled down the dizzying white hallway, she grinned at Sabella, wild, some stranger’s blood staining her throat to her nose. “You’re a real looker,” she said, and Sabella laughed over her tears. “Thank you,” Sabella said. “I mean, really, for everything.” Ais winked at her; Sabella wanted to run away from all of this and drink her in until they died. “It’s all in a day’s work, ma’am,” she said. It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, and Sabella loved her for pretending. Ais hissed, she cried, she asked intervention of every saint learned in K-12 at a Catholic school. A horrible gelatinous noise came as Dr. Young’s gloves touched her innards, and Ais moaned and Sabella said, “You have to stop, this is awful,” and the woman assigned to supervise her held her down and said hush, honey, you need to be quiet. And the doctors’ voices, neither gentle nor unkind: We’re almost done now, Aisling, you’re being so brave. And: It’s a pity she’s too strong to pass out. Sabella went easier, hands she couldn’t see wiping her down and slicing her open while Dr. Park pulled Ais’s insides back together. She’d been scared for so long that the pain didn’t frighten her; she kept asking “Is she okay? What’s happening?” until the woman at her head brushed back her hair and said shh, she’s in the recovery room, you can worry about yourself now. It felt right, fixing her missteps with pieces of Ais, and when Dr. Young said, “There we go, just another minute and you can go take care of her yourself,” Sabella thought about meromictic lakes, about stepping into a body so deep its past never touched its present. END     "Dionysus in London" is copyright Tristan Beiter 2018. "You Inside Me" is copyright Tori Curtis 2018. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back soon with a reprint of "The City of Kites and Crows" by Megan Arkenberg.  

ABOUT MELANIE BROOKS I am a writer, teacher, and mother living in Nashua, New Hampshire, with my husband, two children, and yellow Lab. I grew up in the Canadian Maritimes, and the deep ties to water and rugged spaces that live in me are rooted in that background. I graduated with a degree in English from Gordon College and then earned a Bachelor of Education from Dalhousie University. I later earned a Master of Science for Teachers of English from the University of New Hampshire. I began my career teaching high school social studies and then went on to teach middle school English. After my children were born, I began teaching college writing. I currently teach professional writing at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and Merrimack College in Andover, Massachusetts, and creative writing at Nashua Community College in Nashua, New Hampshire. I completed my MFA in creative nonfiction through the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine. I love words. And I love to play with words on the page. My head is a busy place. An endless film reel plays in there, its frames alive with images and moments, actual and imagined, that I’ve tucked into the folds of my memory. I watch them over and over again, shaping and reshaping, ordering and reordering, trying to make sense of them, searching for the story they want to tell and the language with which to tell it. Unpacking experiences of life and loss is at the core of my writing. When I was thirteen, my father was infected with HIV after receiving tainted blood during open-heart surgery. He died of an AIDS-related illness ten years later. The complicated nature of his disease and the grief of his death have had a lasting impact on me. My writing is the vehicle through which I'm learning to understand that impact. The stories filling the pages are helping me to better understand myself. https://www.melaniebrooks.com/ I first read about Melanie Brooks in Poets & Writers Magazine. Her book, Writing Hard Stories, grabbed my attention and I just had to invite her on my show! Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma "An inspiring guide to ennobling personal stories that travel to the dark sides of life." - Kirkus Reviews ​ “Writers of all genres will glean golden nuggets of advice about writing and living from this book, while all readers, because they, too, have unique personal stories, will be comforted and inspired by the everyday and creative struggles of some of their favorite authors.” - Booklist ​ "[I]t unearths gems of insight, especially about the natures of truth, memory, subjectivity, and fact, and about what memoirs can mean to readers. And it leaves no doubt about the strength required to confront old ghosts." - Publishers Weekly ​ PUBLISHED WITH BEACON PRESS (February 2017) Order Your Copy Here In Melanie's own words Two years ago, I began writing a painful family story that has now become a memoir, A Complicated Grief. Writing into the memories of this part of my life left me with some difficult questions: What does it take to write an honest memoir? And what happens to us when we embark on that journey? Would I survive the process? I decided to approach the writers whose memoirs moved me and ask these questions. Their replies – honest and soul-searing – comprise Writing Hard Stories. This book profiles my conversations with some of our country’s most prolific writers including: Alysia Abbott, Richard Blanco, Kate Bornstein, Edwidge Danticat, Mark Doty, Andre Dubus III, Jessica Handler, Richard Hoffman, Marianne Leone, Michael Patrick McDonald, Kyoko Mori, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Sue William Silverman, Kim Stafford, Abigail Thomas, Jerald Walker, Joan Wickersham, and Monica Wood. These writers invited me into their homes, into their lives, to share the intimacies of finding the courage to put words to their stories. Their candid descriptions of their own treks through the darkest of memories and the details of the breakthrough moments that opened up their stories gave me the mooring I needed to keep writing my own.

Iconic poets Sharon Olds and Mark Doty read from their influential collections, and discuss the secrets behind their fearless craft. This event took place on June 10, 2017, and was moderated by Provincetown poet Kelle Groom.

Afterglow (a dog memoir) (Grove Press) Prolific and widely renowned poet, novelist, and essayist Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match” (New York Review of Books). Afterglow (a dog memoir), Myles’ first foray into memoir, paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: the pit bull called Rosie. In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer's life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s wellbeing, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie’s death, Afterglow launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet-owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles’s experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, gender, romance, memory, as well as the fantastical myths we invent to get to the heart of grief. Afterglow joins a grand literary tradition of writers paying homage to a beloved dog—J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, Virginia Woolf’s Flush, Mary Oliver’s Dog Songs, Amy Hempel’s stories, as well as Mark Doty’s Dog Years, and even Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life—but as one might suspect, Myles’ entry in the canon subverts both genre and tradition and stands apart as resolutely its own thing. Combining screenplay, monologue, science fiction, and lucid memory, the text is animated with photos, diagrams, drawings, and poems to craft a mosaic of their life together. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’s childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from lyrical transcriptions of their walks, to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow illuminates the surreal and familiar aspects of what it means to dedicate your existence to a dog. Praise for Afterglow “A rare new breed of dog memoir; think Patti’s Smith’s Just Kids, not John Grogan’s Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine” –Library Journal (starred review) “Myles’ work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. . . A captivating look at a poet’s repeated attempt ‘to dig a hole in eternity’ through language.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “For more than 16 years, Myles was companioned by a pit bull named Rosie until Rosie did what dogs do and left the author to navigate a post-Rosie world, solo. In the after of Rosie, poet Myles . . . . writesthis unconventional, uncontainable, phantasmagoric memoir of dog and owner. . . . Poetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.”–Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review) “Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy . . . Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight.” –Publishers Weekly “A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is, Eileen Myles’s Afterglow is a truly astonishing creation.”–Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk Eileen Myles—who prefers to use a gender-neutral pronoun—is the author of more than twenty books, including Chelsea Girls, Cool For You, and most recently, I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award as well as an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers’ Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. They live in Marfa, TX and New York City. Their poems were featured in seasons 2 and 3 of the Emmy-winning show Transparent.

The American poet Mark Doty, Professor Sarah Churchwell and the young British poet Andrew McMillan join Matthew Sweet for a programme dedicated to one of the classics of American poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Readings performed by William Hope. Producer: Fiona McLean. Originally broadcast on Thu 8 Oct 2015.

ABOUT MELANIE BROOKS I am a writer, teacher, and mother living in Nashua, New Hampshire, with my husband, two children, and yellow Lab. I grew up in the Canadian Maritimes, and the deep ties to water and rugged spaces that live in me are rooted in that background. I graduated with a degree in English from Gordon College and then earned a Bachelor of Education from Dalhousie University. I later earned a Master of Science for Teachers of English from the University of New Hampshire. I began my career teaching high school social studies and then went on to teach middle school English. After my children were born, I began teaching college writing. I currently teach professional writing at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and Merrimack College in Andover, Massachusetts, and creative writing at Nashua Community College in Nashua, New Hampshire. I completed my MFA in creative nonfiction through the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine. I love words. And I love to play with words on the page. My head is a busy place. An endless film reel plays in there, its frames alive with images and moments, actual and imagined, that I’ve tucked into the folds of my memory. I watch them over and over again, shaping and reshaping, ordering and reordering, trying to make sense of them, searching for the story they want to tell and the language with which to tell it. Unpacking experiences of life and loss is at the core of my writing. When I was thirteen, my father was infected with HIV after receiving tainted blood during open-heart surgery. He died of an AIDS-related illness ten years later. The complicated nature of his disease and the grief of his death have had a lasting impact on me. My writing is the vehicle through which I'm learning to understand that impact. The stories filling the pages are helping me to better understand myself. https://www.melaniebrooks.com/ I first read about Melanie Brooks in Poets & Writers Magazine. Her book, Writing Hard Stories, grabbed my attention and I just had to invite her on my show! Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma "An inspiring guide to ennobling personal stories that travel to the dark sides of life." - Kirkus Reviews ​ “Writers of all genres will glean golden nuggets of advice about writing and living from this book, while all readers, because they, too, have unique personal stories, will be comforted and inspired by the everyday and creative struggles of some of their favorite authors.” - Booklist ​ "[I]t unearths gems of insight, especially about the natures of truth, memory, subjectivity, and fact, and about what memoirs can mean to readers. And it leaves no doubt about the strength required to confront old ghosts." - Publishers Weekly ​ PUBLISHED WITH BEACON PRESS (February 2017) Order Your Copy Here In Melanie's own words Two years ago, I began writing a painful family story that has now become a memoir, A Complicated Grief. Writing into the memories of this part of my life left me with some difficult questions: What does it take to write an honest memoir? And what happens to us when we embark on that journey? Would I survive the process? I decided to approach the writers whose memoirs moved me and ask these questions. Their replies – honest and soul-searing – comprise Writing Hard Stories. This book profiles my conversations with some of our country’s most prolific writers including: Alysia Abbott, Richard Blanco, Kate Bornstein, Edwidge Danticat, Mark Doty, Andre Dubus III, Jessica Handler, Richard Hoffman, Marianne Leone, Michael Patrick McDonald, Kyoko Mori, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Sue William Silverman, Kim Stafford, Abigail Thomas, Jerald Walker, Joan Wickersham, and Monica Wood. These writers invited me into their homes, into their lives, to share the intimacies of finding the courage to put words to their stories. Their candid descriptions of their own treks through the darkest of memories and the details of the breakthrough moments that opened up their stories gave me the mooring I needed to keep writing my own.

Inside the Writer's Studio with Mark Doty by Lighthouse Writers

In this special two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with poet Erika Meitner, author of four books, most recently Copia. In part one, Meitner details her circuitous route to becoming a poet, her early influences (especially the work of Mark Doty), and her conversational diction and increasingly straight-forward poetics. She explains that much of her work arises from a commitment to writing accurately and respectfully about the small town in which she lives, and the challenges of writing as an engaged member of her community while being an othered outsider, a poet, a Jew, and the white mother of a black son. Meitner and Zucker discuss documentary poetry, the ethical considerations of writing about real people, alternatives to the pastoral, and "gritpo," a term neither of them really understand. In part two, Meitner and Zucker speak by phone so that Meitner can describe her experience of reporting in verse while in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. Their conversation explores the difference between poetry and media, the challenges of working on commission and on deadline, and the efficacy of poetry as a tool for social justice.

This April marks the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month, which was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. We will discuss Mark Doty’s “Fire to Fire.” Panelists […] The post The Sandra Moran Alphabet Soup Radio Book Club appeared first on KKFI.

How do we elegantly write about ‘unexplainable’ concepts like spirit, sex, beauty, or death? In a lightly edited panel discussion, national and regional award winners Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, and Lidia Yuknavitch provide thoughtful consideration to this challenging task while referencing literary giants Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. You’ll also hear the third installment of our Election Year Literature segment, featuring Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea’s recommendation.

  AWP 2016 (the conference for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) in Los Angeles was la-la lovely. Marion and I flew out together, for the first time in all of these years of traveling to different cities. Our first bit of business? We discussed what our podcast from AWP would be about. Literary Death Match?  Could we ever have an experience close to the awesomeness of Mark Doty in Chicago? Tony Hoagland in Boston? Abraham Smith in Seattle? How about Chris Abani, Susan Orlean, Danez Smith, and Kirsten Valdez Quade in L.A.?  And since it’s LA, let’s throw in some celebrities like, I dunno,  Martin Starr, Lena Waithe, Michaela Watkins, and Zach Woods.  The Stars at the Literary Death Match Sure, hot enough, but basically, we wanted to sit back and enjoy the show, and then immediately have umbrella drinks on the rooftop, so…what else could we talk about? How crowded it was?  Negative and boring. How expensive it was? Negative and boring. AWP Ladies and Gentlemen! Should we interview our Uber drivers?  Not a bad idea. But, when we thought just that much longer, probably about when we were flying over Wyoming, we thought about the AWP conference and everyone’s expectations, how overwhelming it can be to have so many choices, how undone one can become even when all of those choices are great, we thought about the bookfair. We thought about how much we enjoy “camping out” at the bookfair, letting the attendees and our far-flung friends come to us, doing laps ourselves when we need to stretch. Yes. We’d hang out and the boofair and talk to people about… Writing. What else? Tune in and hear what people are working on when they’re not swimming in the riches of the AWP conference. John-Michael Peter Bloomquis, the founder and director of Poetry for Trash talked to us about his organization. Poetry for Trash goes to public parks and forests, installing stations where passerby can read a poem. The reader decides how much trash the poem is worth, and places the litter they find inside a trash bag. Poetry really is making the world a better place! Tell us what you think about AWP (and anything else) on our Facebook event page. Sign up for our email list if you’re in the area and even if you’re not! Follow us on Twitter @PaintedBrideQ and Instagram @paintedbridequarterly. Read on! -KVM   Kathy Graber and Kazim Ali

We're starting the New Year on a high. This month, The Line Break listens in on the wonderful Mark Doty, poet and author of Deep Lane, recently nominated for the T S Eliot Prize. And back with two more poetry sparks, Ryan has you writing transcendentally about the mundane, and exploring the things you shouldn't say. Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

We break down four foundational tools for the writer’s toolbox pulled from award winning writers Mark Doty, Greg Glazner, Pam Houston, and Lidia Yuknavitch. The tools are: number one - Find Inspiration, number two - Form / Structure, number three - Rhythm of Language, and number four - Reading Aloud.

The American poet Mark Doty, Professor Sarah Churchwell and the young British poet Andrew McMillan join Matthew Sweet for a programme on National Poetry Day dedicated to one of the classics of American poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Readings will be performed by William Hope.

This week's crop of wonders finds the fantastic in familiar things, and the inspiration in the extraordinary: 1:00 - Karen Karbo is railbound! She's one of 24 writers out of 16,000 to score the first round of the Amtrak writers' residency. 3:00 - Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Marée Brown on editing the sci-fi anthology "Octavia's Brood." 10:14 - Oregon Ballet announces that it's found a new home: the South Waterfront. 11:44 - What Are You Looking At? Namita Gupta Wiggers reviews work by Ai Weiwei at the Portland Art Museum. 19:19 - We remember Alvin Josephy, who laid the groundwork for Wallowa County's thriving cultural scene. 23:20 - KPAI's Morning Host Larry Duckworth introduces us to his favorite spins. 28:32 - From the Literary Arts Archives: Poet Mark Doty. 37:36 - opbmusic session with one of Portland's most dynamic new transplants, Robin Bacior. 44:30 - "Oregon Art Beat" introduces us to painter Gabe Fernandez.To read more, visit our site: http://www.opb.org/radio/programs/stateofwonder/segment/state-of-wonder-may-30-2015/

An interview with Mark Doty, Elizabeth McCracken at the Story Prize; Benjamin Percy sings a song; and more.

In the last regular podcast to feature the founder host of the Scottish Poetry Library podcast, Ryan Van Winkle looks back at some of his favourite interviews since he started the podcast in 2008 as part of his Reader in Residence position at the SPL. Featuring Robert Pinsky, Caroline Bird, Sarah Broom, Owen Sheers, Jed Milroy, Matthew Zapruder, Jane Hirshfield, Golan Haji, Sabreen Khadim, Krystelle Bamford, John Glenday, Mark Doty, Paula Meehan, Adam Zagajewski and Mary Ruefle. This podcast was produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm and presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

“It sounds like a simple thing say what you see,” Mark Doty has written. “But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning." In this hour, we’ll take refuge in the sensory experience found in some contemporary poets, as a way of thinking about a number of questions: How does description contain or convey meaning? What do we do when we describe something? Reproduce, account for, portray, trace, parcel out? How does one take the measure of the external world and what can it mean for our writing?

Mark Doty speaks with Ryan Van Winkle about daring to do the things in poems that others are scared to do and bringing aspects of your own personality into your writing and your readings. In this wide ranging discussion we cover such topics as Alec Baldwin, dogs, celebration and the importance of reading widely to develop as a writer. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser.

In an absorbing exchange, acclaimed US poet Mark Doty talks to Richard Scott about some of his most famous poems, the gay experience in literature, the inspiration of Cavafy and Rilke, Doty's new Whitman project, and grieving, courage and desire.

Poets Mark Doty and Sally Keith read from the work of Whitman, and materials from the Library's Whitman collection were on display. Mark Doty is a poet and memoirist, and the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Sally Keith is the author of three collections of poetry: "The Fact of the Matter," "Dwelling Song," winner of the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series competition in 2004, and "Design," winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and elsewhere. Keith teaches at George Mason University. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6009

We are pleased to present a reading by Mark Doty, recorded at the 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference. It all started in 1974 with the founding of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference by novelist Bill Ransom, who envisioned an egalitarian, non-hierarchical conference where the emphasis was on the craft of literary writing. Such writers and welcomers as Jim Heynen, Carol Jane Bangs, Sam Hamill, Rebecca Brown, and many others continued this emphasis on the writing craft over the next few decades, and the Conference has become an annual pilgrimage for many. Whether you’re seeking to create or revise new work, find writing community, or simply desire a writing retreat in an inspirational location, Centrum is at the heart of the thriving Pacific Northwest literary scene. The list of Port Townsend Writers’ Conference faculty members is long and distinguished.

We are pleased to present a craft lecture by Mark Doty, recorded at the 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference. It all started in 1974 with the founding of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference by novelist Bill Ransom, who envisioned an egalitarian, non-hierarchical conference where the emphasis was on the craft of literary writing. Such writers and welcomers as Jim Heynen, Carol Jane Bangs, Sam Hamill, Rebecca Brown, and many others continued this emphasis on the writing craft over the next few decades, and the Conference has become an annual pilgrimage for many. Whether you’re seeking to create or revise new work, find writing community, or simply desire a writing retreat in an inspirational location, Centrum is at the heart of the thriving Pacific Northwest literary scene. The list of Port Townsend Writers’ Conference faculty members is long and distinguished.

'A Green Crab's Shell' by Mark Doty. Published in Atlantis (Cape Poetry, 1996). Recorded in the Poetry Society studio, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX, on Tuesday 8 October.

William and Kim Stafford, Emily Dickinson, Derek Walcott, Jorie Graham, Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Bishop, Luis Montero, David Wright, Gerald Stern, Judith Viorst, Philip Larkin, Seneca, Rumi, Hafiz, Stephen Grellett, C. K. Williams, Eleanor Lerman, Mark Doty, Hilarie Jones, Marilyn Nelson, … Continue reading → The post THE EMERGENCY OF BEING ALIVE (William Stafford): –POETRY AS BRAIN ROADS THE DOCTOR CALLS FOR– ENGINEERING ALTERNATIVE LIFE ROUTES, SCENIC ROUTES, EVACUATION ROUTES first appeared on Dr. Barbara Mossberg » Poetry Slowdown.

(Derek Walcott) : SUMMER POEMS TO COOL YOU DOWN, AND SPEAKING OF HOT JULY, TEXAS POETRY, featuring professor poets Paul Riffin and Wendy Barker, with poems and thoughts by Ruth Stone, Willis Barnstone, Mark Doty, Naomi Shahib Nye, Mark Bibbins … Continue reading → The post Live from Austin: “THE LEMONADE OF SIMPLE PRAISE” first appeared on Dr. Barbara Mossberg » Poetry Slowdown.

A recording from the London launch of Granta 117: Horror, featuring readings from contributors Mark Doty and Will Self; their discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing and the questions and answers with the audience at Foyles bookshop.

Thanking you, Poetry Slow Down, for joining me on this summer day, for an hour away, a way, as we go on vacation, for more poetry of the tourist kind, the tourist mind, perhaps disoriented, as Billy Collins wants to … Continue reading → The post HUSK, SHELL, REMAINS: LETTING IN THE LIGHT, VACATING OUR LIVES TO LIVE: THE ABC’s of A Way to Be and See for Infinity, Featuring Mark Doty’s Reading of a Green Crab Shell first appeared on Dr. Barbara Mossberg » Poetry Slowdown.

Mark Doty speaking at the Key West Literary Seminar.

Our first interview this semester is with poet and essayist Mark Doty. Doty has written more than ten books of poetry and prose, and for his efforts has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His new and selected poems, Fire To Fire, will be published next month. He lives in New York City, but this spring is one of three visiting writers spending the semester at Cornell.Mark Doty read from his work on February 15th, 2008, at the Schwartz Auditorium of Cornell’s Rockefeller Hall. This interview took place the following week.

Mark Doty, author of Sweet Machine (Harper Flamingo). Mark Doty reveals why his mandarin poetry is becoming, well, sleazier.

Mark Doty Heaven's Coast, Atlantis (Harper Collins) Poet Mark Doty's memoir is an expression of grief over his lover's death. How do prose and poetry compare as vehicles for emotion?