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This long weekend we are hosting a "write-off" in our home with between 4 and 6 guest authors staying with us. Four arrived on Thursday, two more arrived on Friday. One had to go home on Saturday, then came back on Sunday.

My husband Rob first encountered "write-offs" in Calgary where IFWA (The Imaginative Fiction Writers of Alberta) hold them twice a year.

The idea is that a bunch of writers get together and write all weekend. You break for lunch and dinner, where you talk and compare progress, etc. Then on the Sunday night you read some of what you've written to each other.

Some "write-offs" you commute to — you stay somewhere else overnight and go to the "write-off" location with your laptop each morning.

Our "write-off" is a sleep-over. Everyone is staying here on our pull-out couches and in the condo guest suite. The writers here are: Robert J. Sawyer & Carolyn Clink (hosts), Hayden Trenholm, Liz Trenholm, Herb Kauderer, Al Katerinsky, Pat Forde, and David Clink.

I've been editing old poems, rather than writing new ones. I have a bunch of poems I took to my poetry writing workshop, The Algonquin Square Table, last year that were critiqued, but I'd never applied the critique to fix them up. So, I've done that now for about 7 poems.

I did also write one new poem. That was because the Science Fiction Poetry Association was having a contest with a deadline of today. (Luckily they only take submissions online!!) I had two poems already written that fit their theme (energy) and their criteria (20 lines or less, PG rated, not previously published). Yay! But, they allow three submissions. So, I had to write a new poem to make my third submission.

So, I went with an acrostic (where the first letter of each line spells something out as you read down the lines). Mine says energy crisis. Hardly worthy of Yeats, but what can you do?

Next up I want to submit to an Irish poetry magazine that's doing a special Canadian issue. Woohoo! Deadline is the end of September.

It's coming up on one year since we went to China. The news is full of Olympic stories. The biggest one seems to be about the pollution in Beijing. We were in China for 10 days, and only saw blue skies once -- at the Great Wall at Jinshanling. Beijing's skies are silver. In Chengdu the grey skies rained every day.

The athletes should also be worried about the heat and humidity. It will be difficult to perform well in Beijing, I think.

Front row: David Livingstone Clink, Al Moritz, Sam Cheuk, Jessica Taylor
2nd row: Carolyn Clink, Susan Manchester, Lois Lorimer, Jairam Seshadri, Marianna Mastagar
Back row: Robert Price

Wow! To think that it was just a year ago, on July 1st 2007, that I left Mississauga, Ontario for Dawson City, Yukon. I left on July 1st, and met up with Rob in Vancouver that morning. We flew on to Whitehorse, stayed overnight, then flew to Dawson the next morning, July 2nd.

That summer I didn't plant any flowers on my balcony in Mississauga. This year I have pansies in purple and yellow.

That summer I didn't get to go to the Farmer's Market at Square One for fresh produce. I just went there this morning and bought cucumbers, tomatoes and strawberries.

It never got dark in Dawson in July. The sun set around 1am and rose about 4am. Here we've got enough sunshine to satisfy me. ;) I can see the moon and the stars at night in Mississauga. It was so strange not to see those things in Dawson until September.

Wow! It was a year ago already. Sigh. How fast a year goes by.

Well, I did not win the CV2 contest, or the Eye Weekly contest. Oh well.

I did just enter the contest at www.spacewesterns.com. They are having a Space Western Senryu contest. Deadline is July 15 -- you enter online. And they explain and give links to what a senryu is. Which is basically a personal haiku.

I have been writing a bit over the summer. Mostly just jotting down notes... and puns. ;)

I took a table at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair in June. It was an interesting experience! I think I prefer to just go as an attendee, because then you get to see all the other tables. But I did help my brother David (we shared a table) sell some of my chapbook Snapshots. As I offered a free copy of my self-published genre chapbook Much Slower Than Light -- with new, excellent, free, space-art cover courtesy of NASA/Hubble to anyone who bought a copy of Snapshots.

I'm still trying to figure out how to use this web site program. Now I can use html to put in links, but I can't figure out bold and italic. The usual codes are doing nothing.

[Ha! I read the instructions!]

This Sunday, April 13, will be the last meeting of this (academic) year for the Algonquin Square Table.

I'm going to workshop a poem I wrote this past weekend for the CV2 48 hour poem contest. You pay $10, and the journal CV2 emails you 10 words that you have to include in a poem. The words this year were: nervous, buckle, rattle, vessel, sienna, wrench, thorax, filament, article, and proof.

Eye Weekly is having a poetry contest with a deadline of April 30. I'm going to try to enter that one too. At least it's free! :)

I had two poetry magazine deadlines this month that I wanted to meet.

First, Gusts, Canada's tanka magazine, had its deadline on February 15. I managed to email in three tanka the day before -- on Valentine's Day. I went looking through my pictures from China for inspiration.

Second, NoD, a journal from the University of Calgary in Alberta, has its deadline on March 1. I sent in three poems by email tonight. The issue they are reading for is: "viral-themed; send work that is parasitic, replicative, related to computer viruses, sickness or epidemics." I can't say that my poems were exactly on topic. But I never want to second guess an editor.

I've been in Gusts three times before, NoD once. Both are fine journals.

I have two published chapbooks.The most recent is Snapshots, May 2007. Plus I had a chapbook in 2000 called Changing Planes.

Snapshots
Published in May 2007 by believe your own press (Thornhill, Ontario, Canada)

You can see what it looks like & order copies here:
There are also 4 poems from the book on that website. The chapbook is $8 plus postage.

That's me on the cover holding my baby brother David. Needless to say this was mumbly mumbly years ago.

Changing Planes
Published in 2000 by Junction Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

This chapbook is out of print at the publisher. The only way to get a copy is to email me: carolyn at sfpoet dot com.
I charge $5 plus postage.

The poetry workshop I belong to, the Algonquin Square Table, started up again in October of 2007. We meet every two weeks or so at Hart House at the University of Toronto. I've made it to most of the meetings so far, and brought some poems written in/inspired by the Yukon.

To play catch-up, Gusts, a Canadian tanka journal, accepted and then published one of my Yukon tanka in issue #6. Then I received an email from Alexis Rotella asking my permission to reprint this tanka in her upcoming Ash Moon Anthology from Modern English Tanka Press (printed by Lulu). It should be out "in early 2008."

Just today, I submitted three China inspired tanka to issue #7 of Gusts. So far I'm batting .500 with Gusts, having appeared in three of the six issues.

In January I submitted a poem to Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, which was accepted. And I submitted a second poem to the special prose-poem issue of Star*Line which was rejected. That's okay. I'm not sure I've got the hang of prose poetry.

Oh, and NYRSF did publish my Chengdu poem! And my interview with David W. Hill seemed to be well received. All credit for which goes to David, who gave great answers to my questions. And since it was conducted by email, I didn't have to retype anything! :)