Cards, Photos, and Paintings: the Happy Collisions of Prose, Poetry, and the Visual Image

picture of card

Many thanks to Joan Digby, editor-publisher of New Feral Press, who created a beautiful  card combining my poem, Memories of Horses, with a historic photo of a 15,000 to 17, 000 year-old  Paleolithic horse drawing from the Lascaux Cave in France. Joan and artist Stanley Barkan are producing a box of Artists’ cards with horse poems and illustrations.  (Thanks, Joseph Hutchison, former Colorado Poet Laureate, for forwarding Joan’s call for submissions.)

I am finding myself loving the pairing of prose, poetry, and the visual image.  The photos I’ve taken at my beloved land now have a home in my upcoming book,  Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, including the cover photo, expertly “tweaked” by Don Mitchell at Saddle Road Press. And I’m in the wonderful midst of  a painting and poetry collaboration with the talented artist Trine Bumiller  (who by the way did the cover illustration for my first book of poetry, Air Into Breath).  The Arvada Center’s Pink Progression exhibit (which we just got funding for!) will happen in June 2020.

And I also find myself thankful to all the artists and writers out there who generously help each other out with calls for submissions and leads and inspirations for projects. I ‘ve missed contributing to that in the way I could all those years through Writers Studio at Arapahoe Community College, but I see it all alive and thriving, here, outside of any institution. 

“Retirement” is okay!


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