Tag: maureen thorson

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April is here? April is here!

And we’ll be digging in mud-season style here on the Bloof blog, dropping some poem bulbs into the muck. That’s as far as I’m willing to stretch that metaphor. The point is, it’s NaPoWriMo time.

What is NaPoWriMo? It’s an unofficial, noncommercial, sans-sponsorship, egalitarian, world-wide (that’s GloPoWriMo to you, bub) celebration of poetry that induces a 30-day fever of daily drafts.

NaPoWriMo started 21 years ago when Maureen Thorson gave herself the challenge to write a poem a day on her blog and jokingly called it “national” even though it was just her, after NaNoWriMo, the novel-writing month (and now nonprofit org) that has been held every November since 1999. Shanna and a few others joined her on their own blogs the following year, and well, then it was a whole thing somehow.

You can read more about it at the NaPoWriMo.net site, where Maureen also very generously offers (optional) daily prompts, podcasts, feature sites, and other resources. (Pssst, we’ve got a new book of essays by Maureen, available here.)

Bloof poets are invited to post with abandon here all month. It’s generally a bit of a mess and a ton of fun to follow along.

APRIL ASSEMBLAGE:

Peter Davis
Natalie Eilbert
K. Lorraine Graham
Steven Karl
Kirsten Kaschock
Becca Klaver
Rebecca Loudon
Sharon Mesmer
Danielle Pafunda
JJ Rowan
Katie Jean Shinkle
Nicole Steinberg
Irene Vázquez
Reagan Louise Wilson
Elisabeth Workman
Shanna Compton

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ON DREAMS by Maureen Thorson: Now available for preorder

22% off through March!

After being diagnosed, or misdiagnosed, with a rare, “invisible” eye condition that causes blind spots, Maureen Thorson set out to write a self-portrait in a broken mirror: a “mirror of my suffering,” wry and poignant, fragmented and necessarily incomplete. On Dreams is allusive, searching, and self-arguing, a lyric meditation on reality, truth, illusion—the warped reality of the mirror image and everything we “see”—and the illusion, “the dream,” of control. 

—Elisa Gabbert

After a pandemic delay and the intervening release of another book by Maureen last year (from our friends at Veliz), we’re finally ready to spring this fascinating book on you, dear readers!

On Dreams is as much a personal exploration on reality and illness as it is a richly documented commonplace book—the notes on the text are integral to the way the essays move, crisscrossed with rabbit holes and byways, with citations ranging from Aristotle to tweets. As Kwoya Fagin Maples puts it: “This work won’t allow itself to be pinned, even by its author. It follows its own north.” We can’t wait to get it into your hands.

Read “Confessions of a Pareidoliac,” an essay from On Dreams, in On the Seawall.

Preordered copies begin shipping in mid April, ahead of the official release in May. Read more about this fascinating collection.