wV writers

Jean Venable, wife of our friend and fellow-writer, Barry Menuez, is featured essayist at bioStories.

Here's how this online site describes itself-

bioStories is conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling, that every life holds moments of grace. We believe stories harbor the essential architecture of biography and that slices of a life properly conveyed can help strangers peer briefly within its whole, hold that life momentarily in their eye, and quite possibly see the world anew through that lens.

A quarterly zine featuring authors living on, near, close to or in the general vicinity of the Hudson River. Submit (500 words or less) to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Subscription info: email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Inaugural issue out April 2013 Editors: Cathy Schmitz and Jeff Paggi

Interested in reading your favorite poem in front of an audience that will include former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky? Submit your favorite poem, along with a brief personal statement about the poem's significance in your life, to DCC English Professor John Desmond at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by March 9. Approximately 15 entries will be chosen for the reading, which will happen April 18. The event is part of the Favorite Poem Project, created by Pinsky.

This morning I received in overnight mail from Oxford, one copy of my new book, HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN: Writing as a Spiritual Practice.

It's a little bit like seeing a new baby for the first time, only this baby took nine full years to make its appearance -- seven writing, and two waiting for, then working with, Oxford. I am so grateful for all the people in my workshops and among my friends who read and commented along the way. Their generosity co-created the book.

If you live in my area, I hope you will join me at the east-coast book launch in the Paradise Room at Smith College, Northampton, 7 - 10 PM, Friday, April 5. The west-coast launch will be Saturday, April 27, at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

Listen to Greg's winning story from TMI, February 14, 2013. The video is dark, but you can hear his words clearly.

Hudson ValleyWriters Guild Announcement

2013 Short Fiction Contest

The HVWG writing contest alternates genres annually. This year's contest is in short fiction.

Poets & Writers Read

Entitlements, we’re all

entitled to something

Everything together
pulls me towards you
while we are pulled apart
like a medieval torture
Our end is soon

You say
it will be alright
I say
we are a pair of candles
burning bright

We leave no residue
We are the residue
of a thousand candles
burned
above a thousand anchors

I will nothing. I can't will. My willer won't work.

I'm stuck here. I saw Mt. Sinai again and now I sit, rooted, in Central Park, near the specimen tree. Bad news epoxies my ass.

I have "other kinds of interference with my dopamine production". They order a DaTscan and other tests, to uncover these new "disorders" and to "start a baseline", measure my decline precisely. I am experiencing "more deterioration" "more frequently than expected". For example, my tics and jerking movements are excessive, and no longer respond to the first drugs, so it might be "exotic-whatsis-name-o-mania"  and each of these "exacerbate the PD", hastening its advance, because they too "interfere with dopamine production", and are destructive to the basal ganglia or what-not. Also, I should go into a "month at a time" mode and not "expect the usual effectiveness" from the big doses of Sinemet I must start on, stat. I should not "compare myself to people who get 3 to 8 years of effectiveness from the Levadopa", and I should "lower my expectations". Titration nausea starts again, but nausea is the least of my worries.