Alsina Publishing to present my flash fiction trilogy

I'm excited to announce that Alsina Publishing will present my fantasy fiction trilogy via LingoBites, their app for language learning via story-telling.

I'm also so pleased and grateful that Selina Fenech, an incredible Australian artist and author, agreed to let me use her beautiful artwork for the trilogy cover!

This gorgeous piece, entitled "Saviour" perfectly illustrates my stories! Check out Selina's website for all her fiction, artwork, coloring books, figurines, etc. You will be amazed!

Update on this post:  LingoBites is in Beta launch mode and I have a limited number of free trial codes to give out--contact me if you are interested!

Miami Book Fair International appearance

The Miami Book Fair International has announced its final schedule and and I am listed as one of the featured authors!  My presentation of my poetry chapbook, Shining from a Different Firmament, will be on Sunday, November 22nd, at 5:30 pm, along with two other local poets/writers.  Now, it's time to begin panicking!  It will be in the Centre Gallery, Bldg 1, 3rd floor, Room 1365.

I'm very excited one of my favorite poets, Kay Ryan, former U.S. Poet Laureate, will be speaking earlier that day!

Heading to the Key West Literary Seminar Writers' Workshop in January!

I was accepted into Campbell McGrath's writing workshop: "Hearing Voices: Crafting the Poetic Voice"; they only accept 12 persons per workshop, so I'm very excited to have made the cut, based on a writing sample of five poems!

This workshop topic is extremely interesting to me, as I write mostly persona poems, and I've been experimenting with different voices.

30 Days of Poetry Love Q&A with Lidy Wilks

Lidy Wilks, fellow Scribber, who blogs at http://iheartallstories.weebly.com/ had the brilliant and fun idea to interview a different poet every day of the month for National Poetry Month.  She was kind enough to make me her April 14th interviewee and publish a poem from my chapbook:  Red Light.

Check out her website every day this month!

Writing year in review: 2014--not bad!

8 acceptances (individual poems)

1 individual poem awarded, 3^rd place.

2 chosen as readers’ favorites (#1 and #3)

1 chapbook runner-up award

1 chapbook accepted (20 poems)

1 Pushcart Prize nomination
1 interview to be published (for Arte Latino Now, at Queens College at Charlotte)

I am most pleased with the Readers' choice and Pushcart nomination!  

Fall was slow, but things picked up in the Winter:

"Nothing in the Dark" a poem inspired by the eponymous classic Twilight Zone episode was published by FLARE: the Flagler Review, Fall edition, page 39.

And "Late Bloomers" was just chosen to be the poem for May in the Writer's Rising Up 2015 calendar.  

The calendar will be available to download for free in January: Digging to the Roots .

Why Write?

I've been thinking about why I suddenly decided to begin publishing my poetry and trying to improve my writing in order to make it publishable.  I certainly don't intend to supplement my income or launch a career at my age, but I notice the poems I'm writing are like a file card index of my memories. My new poems reflect seemingly random flotsam and jetsam that got caught in my imagination and never left me.  But why we notice one thing and not another--how we filter the stream of our life's events through our psyche--these things make up a person.  My touchstone moments are being manifested and recorded via my poems.

My first Pushcart Prize Nomination!

I just received a letter from the editor of Falling Star Magazine that the he and his staff had nominated my poem, "Lincoln's Long Trip Home, 1865" for a Pushcart Prize!  As far as winning, this means nothing because tens of thousands of poems are nominated by small literary journals and presses worldwide, but as it is my first, I am still excited and pleased to have written one of the six poems nominated by Falling Star this year.  The editors put a lot of faith behind my poem and I'm happy they liked it enough to nominate it.  As it came on the heels of several rejections (my record of at least one acceptance a month which began last June was broken in July) it was even more appreciated.

Those who can't write....submit!

The past few months have not been very productive for me, poetry writing-wise, so I'm taking advantage and concentrating on submitting my backlist of poems.  Some of my best haven't been published because they need particular markets which I haven't found yet (or haven't been invented yet!)  Well, that's my take on it,anyway!

It's one way to stay productive in those sparse writing months--no one can publish it while it's sitting in your computer!  And waiting for acceptances is excruciating, so you want to have a constant rolling submission rate to ensure the flow of acceptances is a stream (or at least a trickle!) and keeps you encouraged.

Somewhere I read that if you are a writer who needs encouragement to write, then you can forget about being a writer!  But that's a little harsh, don't you think?  Everyone needs encouragement; sure, there are writers like Emily Dickinson who write in isolation but even she sought out encouragement--that she didn't receive as much as she deserved is another thing.  Genius is often not rewarded in its own age, but most of us aren't geniuses, so we can expect some encouragement, I hope!

I've been receiving acceptances on a regular basis, at least one a month for a year now, and I am waiting to hear from five or six journals/contests right now.  In late May I heard from Spellbound that they accepted The Coqui Prince, my Puerto Rican Frog Prince fairy tale adaptation poem (Whew! That's a mouthful!) for publication in their special anthology edition.  I'm very happy to be included in that!  This poem flowed out very naturally and is based on memories of my father's country house in the hills of Puerto Rico.

I have now passed the criteria (which does not include publications in children's poetry magazines, by the way, which I think is a shame, since writing for children is much more difficult than for adults!  But they were very prompt in adding some journals that were not listed in their publications list, so I can't complain!) to be listed on the Poets & Writers directory, click on my name to see my listing:

Beatriz Fernandez

FIU Writers Conference Wrap-Up

I fought burn-out and migraines during the FIU Writer's Conference but it was well worth it!  I attended sessions held by Frances de Pontes Peebles, Lynne Barrett, Campbell McGrath and the keynote speech by Dennis Lehane, who is very funny!  He told the audience to get used to being "mutants" who care about this weird thing called writing and not to expect others to understand (paraphrasing wildly from memory here, but you get the idea!)

The best experience for me, naturally, was the poetry workshop held by FIU professor and poet Campbell McGrath.  We discussed various styles of poetry and then he assigned us two poems and then we read them and discussed them in class. He said one of my poems was "terrific" and told me to go home and write some more!  When Campbell McGrath tells you that, you dare not disobey!

Lynne Barrett led us through a breakdown of good fiction-writing practices by using Hansel and Gretel as an example of an enduring and effective story.  This was a very interesting method which clarified many things in my mind even though I'm not writing fiction right now.

I wish I could have attended all the sessions and events but I wasn't able to--the activities began at 7:30 in the morning and lasted until the evening with breaks for meals.  I met many nice people and was very impressed with the level of writing of the participants,

Irene Adler haunts Sherlock's mind....

My poem, "Very Truly Yours, Irene Norton, née Adler” which won 2nd place in Spark's Contest Two, will be published in Spark, A Creative Anthology Volume III on Halloween!  

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Hot, hot, hot!

I was just rejoicing in an acceptance of "Letter from Marie C., Paris, 1906" from Yellow Fox Quarterly, when I noticed another email in my box from When Women Waken: a Journal of Poetry, Prose & Images, also accepting my work for their August "home" themed issue! When it rains, it pours! They are publishing three poems: "Summers at Star Lake," "In the Garden," and "Sentinel." I'm very excited to be a part of both these up and coming journals!

Scribophile: a wonderful writer's resource

--Speaking of the necessity of feedback, I've just joined Scribophile, an online writing group, courtesy of my Spark award, and I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the critiques I've had and the works posted. Scribophile works on a karmic point system--you aren't obliged to post work at certain intervals, like some writers' forums, but you have to earn karma points by posting critiques of others' works in order to post your own. There is a free version and a paying version. Inside the system, you can join groups, gain favorites, message and write on other writer's walls, similar to facebook or linked in. There are more fiction writers than poets but even so, lots of quality poetry being posted!

Feedback, the essential fuel for writing

One thing I like about certain journals is that the editors take the time to provide precious feedback for the writer.

A remark by the editor of Boston Literary Magazine enabled me to vastly improve the poem I had submitted, and led me to seek more individual help, which is how I found Andrea Hollander, both a gifted poet and tutor.

In all endeavors in life, sometimes you get to the point where you can't proceed without help. Journals like Boston Literary Magazine and Spark, A Creative Anthology, whose editors and staff provide that essential feedback, are invaluable to a writer at any stage in their development.

Poetry Fireworks!

July began with a bang! On the 1st, I found out that my poem "Very Truly Yours, Irene Norton, née Adler" won 2nd prize in Spark, A Creative Anthology's Contest Two! I won $100, a subscription to American Poetry Review, a lifetime Premium subscription to Scribophile among many other goodies! Spark has the best contests!

"Very Truly Yours, Irene Norton, née Adler" is a re-imagining of the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. I find Irene Adler one of the most fascinating of his female characters, especially since she only appears in one story (the first!) and we know so little about her. That makes her fair game, as far as I'm concerned!

In my persona poems, I like to choose voices of people or fictional characters we know very little about in the personal sense, that way I can let my imagination run free! They may be famous, but have left little correspondence, or there may be some controversy about their motivation.

Another poem, "The Point of No Return" appears in Spark's Volume II, which is hot off the presses as of today! You can buy it at Amazon or directly from their site.
Every time I start to get discouraged with my writing, something positive like this happens and motivates me to continue! I just hope I don't get too addicted to this happening in such a timely way!

After all the excitement....

of National Poetry Month, May has been quiet, writing-wise. I am working on a poem that tries to capture the moment when the first city in America, Wabash, Indiana, was electrified. It wasn't with Edison-type incandescent lights, as one would first guess, but with the much brighter, more economical Brush arc lights. These were better suited for outdoor lighting and large spaces than the Edison lights. The great-grandson of the original inventor Charles F. Brush was kind enough to give me some information on how the Brush lamps operated. The poem is still in-progress.

"Point of No Return" accepted by Spark, A Creative Anthology

Spark a Creative Anthology just accepted "Point of No Return," a sonnet in two septets honoring Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., the first American casualty of the Atomic Age.

I am very excited to be part of Spark's next volume. They have great contests which award not only cash prizes and publication, but also subscriptions and books!

Verse Wisconsin acceptance!

Thanks to Duotrope, a wonderfully useful writer's tool, I've been submitting poetry lately. (Also thanks to Jane Banning, whose works I was searching for when I came across both Verse Wisconsin and Duotrope!) So far 14 poems to five different journals and out of three I've heard back from, one acceptance! Not bad for my first try in years! Verse Wisconsin is a print and online magazine that's been around since 1998, under the title Free Verse, they had to change it when they went online because another ezine had that name already. My poem was accepted for the Spring 2010 online version, which is themed "alternate realities"---who could resist that? Like I told them, my whole life is an alternate reality!

On that note, let me share with you Rainer Maria Rilke's incredible poem You who never arrived, which has to do with my poem; mine refers to the awful possibility that I had not met Jim....now if I could only express myself like Rilke..


You Who Never Arrived
by Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets
that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps
the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

from Theory.com.

Private Persuasions of Poetry: "Ideal Audience" by Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan is the newly named Poet Laureate of the U.S.
This poem succinctly sums up how I feel about writing, reading and being read:

Ideal Audience

Not scattered legions,
not a dozen from
a single region
for whom accent
matters, not a seven-
member coven,
not five shirttail
cousins; just
one free citizen--
maybe not alive
now even--who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room.

from the collection The Niagara River, Grove Press, 2005.

I love Ryan's sly, sparse style: her economy of words reminds me of Mark Strand's work; he's one of my favorite poets of all time.

This poem, referring to the imaginary meeting of minds that occurs when reader and writer connect, out of time, out of physical space, sums it up so perfectly that I can add nothing. It epitomizes what Ryan calls the "private persuasions of poetry."

Most of the writers I've loved were long dead when I was born and I've felt that "exquisite gloom" when I discovered them. It's out of reality yet it's the most authentic feeling I've ever had.

Gonzalo Barr--what an inspiration!

A few days ago I read about Gonzalo Barr, author of _The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa_, a collection of stories, which won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in 2005. He's such an inspiration to all writers who came late to the game--he started writing seriously in 2000 and just quit his job as a lawyer in December of 2007 to become a full-time write at age 49. I read about him in the Miami Herald and his story really resonated with me. I emailed him and he emailed back almost immediately!

What a nice guy--he says his inspiration came from a nun who gave him a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse Five_ and he was also grateful to a librarian who let him sneak into the library and read all afternoon.

Christmas story review--Connie Willis' "Newsletter"

Just read this one--the perfect story to read around Christmas. The title refers to those holiday newsletters people send out and which irritate some people. My relatives never do; I'm lucky if I get a signature on the card, but anyway. The story is about an alien invasion which turns out to be surprisingly benign...at first. Like all Willis' stories, its artistry is invisible. Her situations are so quotidian, her characters are everyday people, everything seems so ordinary, and then she hits you with her magic. She is the one author I wish I could write like, if that's a sentence!
This story is collected in her latest book _The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories_.

Don't miss "Daisy, in the Sun," "Chance" (my favorite short story of all time, I think!), "A Letter From the Clearys," "The Last of the Winnebagos" and of course, "Firewatch." She also writes novels: _Bellwether_ is a humorous favorite and _Domesday Book_ is unforgettable and heart-wrenching.