Author Archive: Jackie
Singing My Song
You know how it goes, right? When you hear that song for the first time, and you tell your kids or your husband to stop talking, or you pull over on the side of the road and close your eyes and let the song fill you up. And you don’t know whether it’s the lyrics, …
52 Songs, 52 Stories
Someday, if I’m feeling ambitious and ready for a challenge, I’m going to do a version of this amazing project: 52 Songs, 52 Stories. The blogger chose a song each week, posted a video for that song and wrote a very short story inspired by the song. He was inspired by several projects, including A …
Book Reviews: A Visit From the Goon Squad, A Fortunate Age
Sometimes you read a book because you’ve chosen it specifically, and other times, books land serendipitously into your life. Recently, my mother passed on a book she’d missed in her book club, and I picked up another at The Book Thing of Baltimore when I dropped off the results of my recent book purge. Despite …
Blogiversary
Like Anjali, I recently passed my 500 post milestone for this blog, which I first posted in on July 12, 2007. That also means that my blog will turn five this summer, the same year that my children and my marriage turn ten. That first month, I had stopped posting in an old personal blog …
Published!
The new issue of the light ekphrastic is up, and happens to be the issue in which my work is featured! Come read the poem I submitted, as well as the poem I wrote, inspired by a painting, and see the painting inspired by my work! This is a really beautiful project, and I’m thrilled …
Ten Years
Happy tenth anniversary, honey. Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960) Pablo Neruda I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom …
Latin American Lit
Exciting news! Next spring, I’ll be teaching a new senior elective at my school, called “20th Century Latin American Literature.” Here’s the description I wrote when proposing it: Torrid sonnets of love, magically realistic epics, post-modern murder mysteries: all of these and more comprise what we call Latin American literature. As the world becomes increasingly …
Writing Goals: Jumpstart Edition
One technique that works for me in goal-setting is making sure I have some concrete tasks to check off as I make progress, in addition to larger conceptual themes. In keeping with my writing jumpstart program, here are my specific writing goals for 2012: prioritize regular writing time join and regularly participate in and attend …
Jumpstarting My Writing
As important as writing is to me, and as central as it is to my identity and conception of myself, when something has to drop from my daily juggling act, too often, it’s writing. So for 2012, I’m determined to jumpstart my trajectory as a writer and poet. This is a broader goal, not a …
Random Bullets of Grading Exams
Reason 14,950 I love teaching freshmen: they write me little notes in the margins of their exams, with exclamation points and smiley faces, and make little jokes about the questions and their answers Quandary #1: if my students do very well, on average, on a section of their exam, is it because they studied effectively, …
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