Lightning and Ashes

When I started doing this blog, I never intended it to be just about the swamp fires. I wanted to have a place to talk about a lot of things, including my writing.

I've gotten side tracked some.

In fact, I saw Mary Biddinger's blog about her book Prairie Fever, and I thought, "I should do a blog on Lightning and Ashes!" So I started a blog on my new book.

But now I'm starting to think I should be talking about it here too. So I will.

For my Lightning and Ashes blog, I wrote a piece called "How I came to Write It."

Here's the beginning of that article along with a link to the other site:

I started working on the poems for Lightning and Ashes after my father died in 1997.

Before he died, I thought I was finished with writing about him and my mom. I had started writing about them in 1979, and now I had written about all the poems I thought I was going to write about them and their experiences in the Nazi slave labor camps. I had written about how he and my mother were taken separately from their homes in Poland, about what their experiences in Germany were like, and about what life was like when my parents and my sister and I came to America.

I felt I had said all I had to say about that part of my parents' life and what it meant to me. After he died, I gathered all of these poems together and started thinking about publishing them in a chapbook, Language of Mules.

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That's the beginning of the piece on Lightning and Ashes. Here's the link to the rest:

http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/