Hanukkah seems like a good time to send a first blog post to begin a new journey in my life. Here’s an bit about what you can expect.

It is, after all, Hanukkah, a time of re-dedication. I’m fully retired at last (yay!), and I’m getting much more serious about both writing poetry and submitting to literary journals. Since last spring I’ve had numerous poems accepted for publication, and lately I’ve been much more actively submitting than I was at the beginning. Yes, these poems are seen by anyone who reads the journals, but I want to share them all with you! I want my friends and family, colleagues and other poets and readers of poetry to see what I’m up to. So here I am, and I hope you’ll enjoy what I share with you.

It is my hope that this will be a space for conversation along with the sharing of my poems, so I hope you will feel moved to comment on my poems and read others’ comments. I also hope to use this blog when I come across poems by other poets that strike me and to share those with you as well.

With all the horrible things going on in the world, I often feel helpless to impact for good. And yet, due to life circumstances, and perhaps changes in my outlook, activism no longer draws me in, even though it is so vitally important these days. Everything I feel about what’s happening in the world and within me is coming out in my poems, sometimes more overtly and sometimes in more hidden ways. Some poems express a response to the events of the world and others are more related to the sources I tap into for strength, resilience, sustenance and meaning. Others are in response to some random prompt from my life. So, in the hope that what I write will add something useful to your life, I’m sharing as widely as I can. Art is always important, and I try to convince myself that is true even more so when fascism is expanding in our world.

I had originally started a Substack account, and then I heard about their Nazi problem. It was so much easier to stay where I was. I could think of lots of reasons why it was OK to do so, but ultimately I decided that one small action I could take was to work on a platform whose leadership states clearly that hate speech and Nazis are not welcome. So here I am on Beehiiv. I really hope it works out!

So, the bottom line is, no promises. This is for fun and enjoyment on my part, and so we’ll see how it all feels as time goes by. I really do hope to be somewhat consistent without overwhelming your inbox. And I have no plans to have paid subscribers - I’m not doing this to get rich!

I admit to being a little impatient to get going. So you may encounter a bug here or there. But I’ll get them worked out in the coming days, and in the meantime, the first poem will arrive in the next day or two.

Thanks for being a part of my journey, and Happy Hanukkah!

Katy