Erin M. Bertram, runner-up in another chapbook contest

Erin M. Bertram, author of The Urge To Believe Is Stronger Than Belief Itself, is runner-up in Green Tower Press's chapbook contest this year. Read about the contest, Green Tower Press, and the chapbook series here: http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/tlr/.

Chapbook launch March 3 - Weaving the Light

Please join us for readings by Mary Ruth Donnelly from her new and exquisitely lovely chapbook, Weaving the Light, just out from Cherry Pie Press.

When: Tuesday, March 3, 6:30pm – 8pm
Where: Soulard Coffee Garden, 910 Geyer Ave., St. Louis, MO 63104
Note, the reading is in the upstairs room, which involves a flight of stairs
What Else? There will be some light refreshments, and the company of good people.

Here is the full announcement about the chapbook, with sample poems: http://cherrypiepress.blogspot.com/2008/12/weaving-light-by-mary-ruth-donnelly.html

Hamamelis, a.k.a. Witch-hazel

February, land of dreary gray and also of opening-up things. The landscape here at Cherry Pie is the wheat-blonde of winter, that bland hay-colored absence of color that the living world takes on while it's not actively living. Everything else is gray and brown -- until this week.

Witness the arrival of Hamamelis, the first fireworks to emerge from winter -- witch-hazel. Her name is from Middle English roots of "Witch" or wiche, and that from the Old English wice, pliable or bendable. She is a wild-haired lady.

Here she is, marching around Cherry Pie land. Her accompaniment is a small and optimistic crowd of daffodil shoots.

Send me a poem about witches or witch-hazel. I'll post the most interesting ones.

Tips on blogging and pleasure

Sometimes I scout other blogs to pick up ideas and tips. Penelope Trunk is one of the best, and her nominally business-related posts relate to life in general as much as they do to business. In one of her blog's "how to blog" entries -- see entry #9 on her list, The Poetic Link -- she includes a link that, via the idea of "pleasure," sends you on a circuitous and wonderful journey to Roland Barthes and his ideas on "readerly" versus "writerly" texts. Squeezed to a too-brief essence here, the Wikipedia article cited by Trunk describes "readerly text, which does not challenge the reader's position as a subject. The writerly text provides bliss, which explodes literary codes and allows the reader to break out of his or her subject position."

Translated to poetry, what would that be? Any suggestions for a readerly poem, or a writerly poem? What it does to the reader...

777 chapbooks!

Tallying up the sales and distribution numbers for Cherry Pie, I calculate that 777 copies of the first eight chapbooks are now in readers' hands.

Each chapbook has between 25 and 50 copies distributed free -- to potential reviewers, to the author, to previous Cherry Pie authors, and to a core set of "friends" of the press who in some unforgettable way encouraged the start of all this. The rest of the 777 figure is due to sales, or a small portion of that due to store inventory (3-5 copies of each book) sitting at Left Bank Books, local independent bookstore and haven for the writer.

By whatever means these books arrived in your hands, Dear Reader, enjoy, and read, and may one book lead to another. Thank you.