Mom rode. Dad wrote. The story galloped on…
“She’s the Rider,” I used to say, pointing to my sister. “And I’m the Writer.”
It held for decades, until she started writing poetry, darn it:
EARTH SONGS III
Lying in the
Milky Way
sprinkled like
cornmeal on
the sky,
watching the traces
of fireworks
millions of miles away.
Early morning moonlight
through the ponderosa pine
the moon dance crystalized,
gave
me
vapors
while the owl sang.
No—she’s good. But not that we can switch it up to the Poet and the Prose-writer, since she has a novel hidden away in the mountains back behind Boulder, and, yes, thank you very much, I do write poems too:
OUTSIDE BEND
Stars scatter all the way
to the ground
Headlights illuminate
a creek bed gouged into green, then brown
(earth cutting into earth)
Signs loom and then pass silent in the dark
time –
sleepless –
stretches
Our Greyhound dreams, a nightmare or two
cross and interlace,
scroll restless down the driver’s back
My son, 14, nods warmly into me, so like
the baby he just was
The moon is half
There, back between the hollows of
your frosted hills,
one light –
who’s home?
Anyway, who says the labels have to be so hard and fast? I ride herd on the commas (or lack thereof) in my sister’s poems. She questions a too-prosaic word or applauds a shortlist achieved.
And when my novella is longlisted for Regal House Publishing’s Fugere Book Prize https://regalhousepublishing.com/2023-fugere-book-prize-longlist/ , meaning, possibly, publication as a book, she cheers it on. (Disclaimer: the long-distance conversations in the novella between brother and sister come from a series of my sister’s hilarious emails re gardening for, shall we say, dummies).
When I don’t win the prize, the nearly-forgotten Rider part of the old equation kicks in—I waste no time getting back on the horse , researching more novella competitions, and finding three to enter post-haste.
In the saddle. Yee-ha ~
Oh. In the photo? My only horse show. Ever.
Knew my story “Bread” was a finalist for the Cedric Award. But now we were rolling through Colorado (could have been Utah, possibly Nevada). No wi-fi. Finally checked emails in Sacramento. But forgot about the other email account. Home. Busy writing and editing (myself and others). About a week later, happened to look at the Cedrics website. Then found the email announcement. Hello, I’d won the 2017 Cedric Literary Award in Fiction…