poetry

Women Empowering Women

Lynette M Burrows

Women empowering women is a strong and beautiful act. How does this happen? Women lift others with their voices through song, art, dance, speech, poems, stories, and mentorship and so many other ways including small acts of kindness. Art Feminist art emerged in the 1960s. From sculpture to paintings to drawings and performances, these artists highlight societal and political differences associated with gender identity.  Here’s a list of 15 artists to get you started. POETRY Poetry, or words that make music in your heart, has many forms. And there are thousands of strong women poets. Below are two examples. “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou “You are more than beautiful” by Rupi Kaur SPEECH 2014 Emma Watson gave this fabulous speech at the UN launcing the HeForShe campaign. There are many, many TED talks about women’s rights and empowerment. Here’s a list of 3,000 titles. BOOKS There are many nonfiction books and many fiction books that tell the story of women empowering other women or themselves.  Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margarot Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me,  are a very small sample. MUSIC Songs of celebration to songs of protest, music has always been […]

Achieving and Pursuing

Lynette M Burrows

Although Mr. Longfellow lived in the 1800s, I think his words about achieving apply today as well.   The doing can be anything that your heart desires as long as you are achieving, pursuing, laboring, and waiting. I think he means let fate be what it might, whether you face failure, obscurity, or fame and success. It’s the achieving and pursuing that is worth doing. What do you think Mr. Longfellow means?

A Meeting of Minds: the Alchemy of Science, Art, and Poetry

Lynette M Burrows

I have belonged to a local writer’s group for many years now. In this group, we have a colorful mosaic of like-, yet, different-minded folk. There are young and mature members, males and females. Some members write with a literary style, some have a dense, elaborate style, some are more minimalist. Yet, we have a meeting of the minds in that we are all striving to improve our work. More than that, we take disparate ideas from science, art, and poetry, and like alchemists, blend them into something different, something called science fiction. It is my great pleasure to share with you the works of two of my writer’s group members: Karin L. Frank and Jan S. Gephardt. Not only have they had a meeting of minds that yielded science fiction, they added science, art, and poetry to the alchemist bowl resulting in a rare gem, a chapbook called A Meeting of Minds: Poems from the Two Cultures. About Karin Karin’s bio sets the tone: Karin L. Frank (KL Frank) wrote her first story at the age of four and submitted it to her kindergarten teacher. No literary review accepted it but it was published on the family refrigerator. Karin […]