At my local yarn shop, we were sitting on the couches talking about what knitting means in our lives. As the conversation revved up, with everyone tossing out comments about how knitting can be at once meditative, creative, solitary, and communal, one knitter threw in, “It’s like we all have a yarn to share.” As…

When I first began to think of myself as a writer, a few decades ago, I’d type onto file cards the wisdom of writers I wanted to emulate and thumbtack the cards to the bulletin board above my desk. I had several lines about the writer’s vocation by Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton. But the…

When I first heard of T.S. Poetry Press, I assumed that the T.S. was drawn from Eliot fame. But a visit to their website corrected my impression. Behind the Press’s founding was a game started by some inventive poets called “tweetspeak.” It’s a “Twitter poetry party,” a one-hour bash where everyone tweets a 140-character poem…

Part of the delight of preparing my new course on Poetry as a Spiritual Practice for the Glen Online has been returning to some favorite interviews with poets in past issues of Image. I enjoy reading what contemporary poets have to say about their art almost as much as I enjoy reading their poems. I love, for…

My husband and I are in a flurry of dealing with the “stuff” in our lives. Had to replace the old stove, then the broken couch. Then discovered that the old table lamps next to the old couch were too low for the higher replacement couch…so off we went to shop for new lamps. And…

Once I asked my neighbor, the composer David Liptak, why listening to classical music can be so meditative. David offered: “when your mind is focused on following the pattern in music, other preoccupations tend to drop away.” As I expand my skills in knitting (which I’ve mused on in earlier posts such as this oneand…

Everyone knows Rumi—thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’ rich, delightful translations. But how many know the other early master of Sufi poetry: Hafiz of Shiraz? Now, thanks to a new translation, Hafiz too can become a joyously playful companion on our spiritual journeys. Like Rumi, Hafiz was Persian, living in the fourteenth century—just a…

Last weekend I found myself having breakfast at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle with Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns. That Kathleen Norris was there was no surprise to me—she was in town to give a reading at Seattle University, and Greg Wolfe and I had met her to talk about Image’s Oahu Seminar. Scott Cairns…

Last weekend I found myself having breakfast at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle with Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns. That Kathleen Norris was there was no surprise to me—she was in town to give a reading at Seattle University, and Greg Wolfe and I had met her to talk about Image’s Oahu Seminar. Scott Cairns…

It began during one of those amazingly passionate times in my life when the past and the present collide like great movements of water, merging, sweeping me off. —Joe Enzweiler, on the origins of his poem cycle, A Curb in Eden It’s a writer’s grace or good fortune to find a community of supportive fellow…