Sarah Degner Riveros

Dear scholarly publishers & small independent poetry presses:

Please publish an audiobook for each new scholarly & / or poetry collection release.

As the government collapses, we have more work on our shoulders. We can multitask with an audiobook on smart speaker.

Signed: Single Mom Professor

A woman wearing a black jumpsuit stands in front of a bookcase.

Another day, another jumpsuit!

#DIY #ClosetCore #BlancaFlightSuit #Sewing

Envy ‘Why does it hurt only to read good work by the living?’ Kathryn Chetkovich in Granta 82: Life's Like That.

Saving this here to read again and to try to make sense of silence.

granta.com/envy/

Today's portal:

What are the gifts of darkness? What do you hope for in the first light? What is clear and what is opaque? What do you need to see printed in black & white? Where is the grey? How do these colors live together in your body and in your psyche?

Black and white modern print fabric swatch

Dark & bright in predawn light

#5AMWritersClub
#Creative
#WritingCommunity
#Poetry

Today's portal:

Somewhere is everywhere - everywhere is somewhere. Where do you feel sorrow, hope, suffering, or joy in the world? Where do you feel these in your body? What is happening somewhere else that affects your well-being? What is your body doing here now that impacts someone somewhere?

It's 5 o'clock somewhere. My journal is calling.

#5AMWritersClub #Somewhere #Writing #AmWriting #Poet #WritingCommunity

“That’s when they suspended the constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t any rioting in the streets. People stayed home, watching their televisions, looking for direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put a finger on.”

—Margaret Atwood, Handmaids Tale

🤣😭 #Relatable

We write to thrive.

#5AMWritersClub #WritingCommunity #Wellness #SpiritualHealth #Wellbeing #Faith #Hope #Love

Today’s portal:

Where do you feel fever or pain in your body? What images and emotions does the pain evoke? Who embodies a healing presence for you? What medicine brings comfort? Who keeps watch as you rest? How does your body express the ability to heal? Where do you feel healing happening?

A red and white flower

We write to heal.

#5AMWritersClub #healing #naturalmedicine #WritingCommunity

Thank you for sharing this. We will write our way through.

Today's writing prompt, courtesy of Edgar Gomez via 100 Days of Creative Resistance (Writing Co-Lab):

www.writingco-lab.com/100-days

"Choose a person you love. Write about one perfect day you had together. Leave out any wisdom. Just remember something nice and hold on to it as long as you can."

During college I memorized sonnets and recited them while walking and running in the city. The rhythm of poetry and the bilateral stimulation of movement is healing to the brain.

I love this idea of using poetry as medicine, as a natural sleep aid to support and regulate breathing.

My new year's resolution is to breathe better.

A book I'm reading by Patsy Rodenburg says this (with a reminder of the etymology of "inspiration"): "The knowledge hidden in the word inspiration is true. We need to take a full breath to capture an idea."

Breathing deeper helps me sleep better too.

I moved from a literary desert to the abundant creative oasis of the Twin Cities. Here in St. Paul there are Little Free Libraries in front yards on nearly every block and bookstores and libraries in every neighborhood. Living in this literary city is a dream come true.

Today’s portal:

What is the color of sorrow? Where in your body do you carry loss? Whose bodies populate the landscape of your memories of grief? What parts of grief have feeling and what parts are numb? How does your body express lament? When is grief embodied in your dreams?

Mosaic butterfly

We write to feel.

#5AMWritersClub #Grief #Joy #WritingCommunity

Today’s portal:

Write of a time you spoke truth to power. Where did you feel the truth welling up in your body? What part of your body held the power? What words did you speak? What did your body language say?

Photo of glasses on a blank graph-lined notebook

We write the world we want to see.

#5AMWritersClub #WritingCommunity

Typewriter poetry at the Christmas market

Pictured is a filing from the National Labor relations Board website showing a petition for certification of a labor organization as the representative of a collective bargaining unit. The employer is Macalester College located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There are 1,300 employees in the proposed bargaining unit made up of All student workers as defined below. Student workers is defined as those who are (1) enrolled as undergraduate students, full-time or part-time, at Macalester College and (2) employed by Macalester College as non-exempt, hourly employees or employees receiving a stipend, including those in a research fellowship

BREAKING: 1,300 undegraduate student workers at Macalester College in the Twin Cities are unionizing as the Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms." --Nineteen Eighty-Four

¡Acentos! ¡Ortografía!

linktr.ee/SarahDegnerR...

Her concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago was my first concert memory some 40+ years ago.