Well, I started this blog in 2005 and never followed up on it. Now that I have started a new one called Mind Lint I think I'll try to use this one for more talk about writing and related topics.

Let's start with a short trip. Two weeks ago I went to the Hill Country of Texas at the invitation of good friends, both poets of considerable skill, to attend the Burnet Poetry Festival. It was a thrill to see a poem of mine used on the back cover of their anthology, The Enigmatist, (but I did accuse Mike of not wanting to contaminate the work inside with my stuff.) Having my work in the same place as Gary Snyder and Li Young Lee was a real ego boost. I think the reason we go to these things even knowing that we will be reading to each other and buying each other's books is because we need the relationship with others that are trying to do the same thing we are. It works! I always come back from events like this with new vigor in my writing, with a new committment to the process (edit, revise, edit, rest, edit, then with great reluctance, let go).

Now I'm working on new pieces to be ready for submission to the biggie, the Austin International Poetry Festival. The seventeenth of these will be held next year April 23-26 and I'm proud of the fact that I have been a participant the last nine years. I hope that they will, once again, ask me to host a venue or two, that was a real pleasure last year. English poet, John Row, was the feature in my venues and was a treat. Especially fun and sometimes moving were his stories about his "day job" as Poet-in-Residence ("that doesn't mean I live there!") at Suffolk Prison, Suffolk, England. I'm anxiously waiting for more information on who is coming this year. The festival has shrunk a little these last couple of years due mostly to the expense of travel. The British contingent is down a few and I'm not sure that Singapore is sending anyone this year but we still have many states and a few foreign countries represented. Last year saw poets from the US coming in from Maine to Washington State, California to Florida. Spain, Australia, New Zealand, England and Mexico were some of the countries represented. The total was over one hundred and we had a great time. Academics, performance poets, slam poets, lyric poets who had never shared their work before, they were all there. This is still, I think, the largest non-juried poetry festival in the country. That means if you sign up and show up you get at least one venue to read at with a ten minute block of time to read. No critique (unless you ask for it afterward) just appreciation for your willingness to expose yourself in your work. Maybe someone will see this (if anyone sees it) and decide to make the trip. You can check out registration information at www.aipf.org . Email me if you have any questions.

Ok, enough for this time. Hopefully there will a next time very soon.