My Semester of Rest and Relaxation
Hahaha. No. Welcome to January! A new poem in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. This year is one of big changes, bookclubs, classes and much more in 2025.
Hello and welcome, new readers and old friends and everything in between! This month I hope to revamp all my “About Me” and “Welcome” pages, but until then those of you who are new are meeting me in media res.
If you follow me on Substack Notes or on X, then you probably know that my poem “Transition Age” was posted by Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Many thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim for publishing it.
Both of my boys are on the autism spectrum and attend a special education placement. My oldest turns 22 in February and so we are in the process of making a difficult transition from an educational therapeutic institution to services provided by DDS. Due to the complexity of my son’s needs I have decided to take this semester off and resume my MFA in the summer when I attend my in-person 10-day residency at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.1
“Transition Age” was a poem I wrote for Ryan Wilson’s Poetry of Meditation MFA class. He thought it was a solid poem, but I took it to my monthly Catholic Literary Arts poetry critique group to tighten it up. I am always grateful to Sarah, Fr. Phil, Christina, Tamara, Paige and Ashley for their feedback. Not all of us are available each meeting, but those who are able to attend are always helpful.
I’ve been sick off and on for the past 3 weeks. I actually have a fever as I am writing this. A couple of my kids have been sick, too. One of our friends passed away on December 27 at the age of 49 (younger than my husband and I), and my Uncle Diego died on January 5 after a long bout with cancer. He is the younger brother of my mother, and there is something shocking when life seems taken away out of an assumed order. My own father died in his 50s, and it is strange now to be 50 and think that any moment now I might be gone too. There is likely more life behind me than ahead of me, and it is sobering for me to see my mother become the matriarch of the family when she was born in the middle of 12 children. Times of illness and death are opportunities to think about how precious our health is.
Everyone has been urging me to pursue this so-called-remedy called “rest”. And so here I am “resting” and feeling utterly useless, fidgety, and out of shape—I hate it. To be honest, it is my mind, shaped by good ole American work ethic, that hates rest. However, my body is apparently Filipino and has reminded me how much merienda and siesta are part of my heritage.
Inside me two wolves are trapped in a struggle. Their names are Productivity and Recuperation. I am feeding one of them lumpia and pancit.
While watching The Bear at the insistence of Jane Greer.2
I am also reading a lot because I can’t go out on my long runs anymore while hacking up a lung up and down the frigid New England hills.
So I am accepting the disaster…
While in bed I read Joshua Mehigan, Linda Pastan, X.J. Kennedy, and J.D. McClatchy. Accepting the Disaster by Joshua Mehigan is fantastic—devastating and horrifying in turns. Linda Pastan’s “Reading The Odyssey in Middle Age”, which appears in Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poem 1968-1998, inspired me to start a long narrative poem. Ten Commandments by J.D. McClatchy was an impulse grab from the poem section, which I ended up enjoying — its conceit being that each group of poems addresses a preceding commandment. Finally, I got X.J. Kennedy’s Peeping Tom’s Cabin to lighten things up.
I also ordered some books from Wiseblood Books with my Christmas money.
Speaking of Wiseblood, my friend and classmate
from has a collection, The Locust Years, that is available for pre-order. If you order two books you get a beautiful locust pin based on the artwork you see on the cover.
Paul Pastor is one of the most supportive people I know, and he is one of the reasons why I send my poetry out in the world instead of squirreling it away in journals. In 2022, when I attended the Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas, Paul read his poem “The Locust Years” at the UST graduate student reading. Afterward I showed him one of my poems, and he recommended that I send it to Ekstasis.3 This became my first published poem. After the conference I joined Catholic Literary Arts and then I applied to the MFA program and the rest, as you might say, is history.
Speaking of Catholic Literary Arts, the 2025 Sacred Poetry Contest is underway and the deadline is March 31, 2025. This is an ekphrastic contest based on artwork on the CLA website. There are cash prizes for first, second and third place. This year’s judge is Sally Read, author of The Mary Pages: An Atheist’s Journey to the Mother of God and editor of the fantastic anthology 100 Great Catholic Poems.
If you are looking for some 11th hour help with writing ekphrastic poetry, Catholic Literary Arts has some applicable workshops on their website. Today (Sunday, 1/12/2025) is the last day to register for the ekphrastic poetry course led by Judith Sornberger. Those classes meet Mondays, January 13, 20, 27, 2025.
Not that long ago my friend
at tagged me in a note about an abecedarian writing contest. For those who don’t know, an abecedarian is a poem where each line or each stanza starts with a letter of the alphabet.
I fell asleep so I missed the deadline to submit “Jeannette”, a blank verse abecedarian which begins “A little girl once walked into the woods, / Beyond the sight of her distracted parents” but then the search party finds her…
Under the canopy of trees she sat, Very contentedly. She would not move. Whipped by a frozen chill they stood, stock still. Xanthic light covered her from head to toe…
I think the concept is sound, but the execution is not there yet. The dark turn at the end is a bit may make this a project worthy for a Halloween edition of
— should they choose to produce one again.One of my Catherine Project friends let me know that his wife and other have just launched a new literary journal for Christian poets. It is called Mark. Some of my friends may be interested in submitting work. Physical copies will be on sale at The Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge, MA.
Speaking of the Catherine Project, I found out I got into the Core Program which runs from February 3 to April 21. We will be reading the following:
Since I am not taking an MFA course this spring I thought this would be doable, but I also have the following Substack bookclubs which are currently reading:
- : Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed
- : Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
- : Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
There are so many other great learning opportunities on Substack, but this is where I had to cap my big reading. I am still actually going at my own snail-pace with War and Peace—thanks to
for getting me started. and over at have their own War and Peace read along (with helpful printable bookmarks) and a list of other great bookclubs (which overlap with my list above):
And if you like Jane Austen,
at will be leading a tour of all of Jane Austen’s novels this year in honor of the author’s 250th birthday in December. Last year I read through all of Austen’s novels, but I would not mind going through the oeuvre again.Are you doing any online bookclubs? Taking any online courses? Starting any big creative projects in 2025? I would love to hear what you are doing.
That’s my update. Please pray I shake this fever soon. Until then I am heading off to bed to be buried under various translations of the Iliad or I may start another episode of The Bear.
For those of you who may be interested, there is a much shorter, very affordable Summer Writers Institute than runs concurrently with my residency and may be very helpful for those curious about the writing program I am in.
Formalist poet, Jane Greer’s latest book of poetry is The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022.) It’s wonderful. You can buy it here.
I would tell you to take some books off your plate, but that would be the pot calling the kettle black. 🤣 Adding to my reading list makes me feel more alive. I have given up on reading challenges though. I find I fill my reading life up well all by myself.
I am reading along with ALL the Close Reads, Well Read Mom, RAR Momma Book Club, slowly reading through Malory in Middle English, my personal list to celebrate my 40th year of life, AND I just subscribed to a read along Dante plan.
Get well! For me, Auden is always the answer.