buckle up - 17th bloggiversary retrospective!

Greetings, Poetry People!  I'm coming to you today from my first "travel gig" in little Williamsport, MD. It's a 75-minute drive from home, so I'm actually spending some nights away in the course of this residency, which includes dates in Oct, Nov and Jan for 5th, 4th and 1st grades at Williamsport ES.

Being able to go hither and yon to teach POETRY is a dream I had only begun to enact when I started this blog in 2008. I had returned  from  a year in France with my family (where I had, in fact, conducted a couple of  workshops at the American Library and at an international school), but 2008 was the restart of my public school teaching career after teaching part-time in a nursery school while my kids were young. Here's a post in which I explain my blog's title to Daisy, then age 9.

SQUEEZE had been published, PUMPKIN BUTTERFLY was in the works, and I was still part-time, which would have allowed plenty of time to write the next book--if I  hadn't  gotten distracted by the state of school in my district. My good neighbor and I had blithely been sending our kids thinking it was one of the Very Best School Systems in the country, but when we both began teaching therein that fall, we looked at each other over Halloween costume making and said, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Our response was to devote the next 3 years to spearheading a long and arduous public charter school project which in the end was a most spectacular failure. Do I regret it now? Yes and no. At the time it seemed like a worthy investment in offering a wider range of

educational options in our county, and I met a ton of cool people, and old friends who trusted me got on board with time, treasure and talent, and I DID write a pretty good book. The application was 375 pages long and it was built around POEMS that expressed our vision. On the other hand, without really realizing what I was doing, I threw myself off the kidlit poet career path and hardly even attempted to submit further manuscripts until---well, last month!

In 2010 I went full-time in a kindergarten classroom (4 years), which led to the OIK series at my juicy little universe: Overheard in Kindergarten. In those days I could actually remember verbatim the interesting things the kids said in the course of the day and then write poems from them, even blog about them! Then came 2nd grade (4 years), and then PreK (3 years). In the years I've been writing this blog, I have taught approximately 340 kids for 10 months of their lives, plus probably another 500 or so in shorter-term, part-time workshop situations, either after school or during school residencies. It's not thousands, but it's a good number.

A few more numbers:

*I've written a total of 862 posts in these 17 years.

*862/17 = 50.7 posts per year--that's nearly one a week for 884 weeks. Gosh.

*Of course, some years have had way more: currently 2016 is the winner with 72 posts, which included one of the several National Poetry Month projects where I did almost daily posts.  

*The year with the fewest posts (not counting the first year and the current year) is 2024 with only 29 posts, down from an already reduced 39 in 2023. I've moved gradually to a twice-a-month posting schedule, perhaps because building the box to contain my WHISPERshout activities turned out to be more fun but also way more time-consuming than teaching inside the prefabricated box of a classroom!

During these years I've also had the opportunity to slip quite a few individual poems into quite a few anthologies, journals, magazine articles, newspaper columns and other projects, both adult and kidlit. I'm always thrilled to respond to an anthology call, y'all!

The latest of these one-off projects is my poem "Brownies: Baked-In Math," which was selected by Heidi Bee Roemer for her STEAM Powered Poetry list!  That makes me an "Esteamed Poet" (hee hee), in great company with some of our Poetry Friday friends: Robyn Hood Black and Linda Kulp Trout. This poem was originally written for a Lee Bennett Hopkins anthology, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MATH, but he selected another poem for the book, which I still have hope will appear. Lee's esteemed fingerprints are on "Brownies" too. I'm excited to share all the great promo materials "the other Heidi" and her STEAM TEAM have developed. Here's a video overview.

The poems are written for a grade-school audience, have STEAM themes, and are available for high school and college students to turn into videos which they can submit to a contest, with cash prizes for the winners! Find links to the contest poems here: https://steampoweredpoetry.com/contest/poetry-packet-download/

And now, a few shout-outs to the folks who have accompanied me on this journey since the early days: 

*Robin Galbraith, my very first commenter, AKA  A Nice Gal AKA Rowena Eureka, parent of a kid in my first nursery school class, member of my earliest critique group, fellow climate activist and now DAILY protestor in downtown DC, who really walks the walk as well as writing the talk;

*Laura Purdie Salas, who commented on my very first Poetry Friday post on March 27, 2009 and has been a deep resource on all things writing career since even before the blog;

*Tabatha and Laura Shovan (my local friends and champions), Linda KT and Mary Lee who all have been reading and commenting encouragingly for 16 of those 17 years;

*gratitude to Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, early appreciators of my work and supporters of so many new poets; Marilyn Singer, SCBWI mentor who invited me to ALA Poetry Blasts in 2010 and 2011 (and with whom I'll present at NCTE25), and Tricia "Miss Rumphius" Stohr-Hunt, who encouraged me with a lengthy interview in 2010;

*and of course, to the Inklings--Margaret, Catherine, Linda, Molly and Mary Lee--for making me a better poet bit by bit over almost TEN years now. 💞

And that's about all of this horn-tooting reminiscence that any of us can take for now! I really am grateful for this invention of self-published technology, for the best parts of the INTER-NET (think about what that actually means and embrace it). I'll close now with the ritual reposting of my bloggiversary acrostic:

 

Bloggiversary Poem, repaired

All threads and trains, 

No rules, restraints;

No due dates, deadlines, or demands.

I get to choose. It's in my hands:

Voice, vocabulary, venom or valentine--

Each and every muse is mine.

Reach out deep or dive in wide; noisy soapbox, soft aside;

Sampling the past or hewing the new

As I talk to myself or write to you.

Revels, relations, revelations live here

Year after year after year.

original HM 2016; redraft 2025

Thanks finally to our host Patricia, who joins the revels, relations and revelations with some Reverie!

Blog Benediction:

May you all enjoy the same blog satisfaction as I have had the good fortune to do!