3/16-22 BB Happenings
Book buds:
Hi! I hope you all had a nice weekend. Yesterday’s retreat was lovely. Thanks to those of you that made it. Here’s what’s happening this week!
Feedback Group Submission Schedules!
IRL Group Wednesdays @ beautyland 6:30-8:30: Next meeting is March 18 Aimee and Johanna have pages due ASAP. Rich and either Chris or Genna will have the floor for the April 1 meeting, no fooling.
Noon Crew Thursdays 12pm - 1:30: The next meeting is March 19 and Jill will have the floor with pages are already in. If you can’t find them, let me know and I’ll forward! Sara, you’re up after that for the April 2 meeting.
Weirdlings Wednesdays 12pm - 1:30: We meet again on March 18th and Dana has the floor with stuff due ASAP or we’ll pivot to something else! Let me know if you have ideas! Ed, it’s all you for the April 1 meeting.
Kool Kids Thursdays at 7pm - 8:30: Our next meeting is March 26. Susan and Hilary will have the floor with pages due on March 21.
OG Crew Thursdays at 7:30pm - 9: The next meeting is on March 19. Tom is up in the rotation with pages already in. The following meeting is April 2 and Malavika and Kristina will have the floor. Kristina’s already sent her pages, and Malavika we can check in when we’re next together.
Saturday besties 12:30pm - 2: The next meeting is March 28 with floor time for Georgia and Ali. Pages are due March 21.
Book Buddies Being a AWESOME
You all are doing so many cool things lately.
Genna Sarnak has a forthcoming poem (out March 15!) in Faoilenach Journal: https://www.faoileanachjournal.com/. She’s also got another poem out via Scapegoat Review. You can read it here. AND she has another poem in PHIL LIT journal which you can read here and also vote for as your fave from that journal’s Spring issue. Let’s all rally for Genna and get her poem up to #1!!
Johanna Wilbur won a partial scholarship to this summer’s Martha’s Vinyard Institute of Creative Writing’s Summer Conference which she’ll be attending in June.
Gen Writing Prompt for this Week:
March 17 and 21, 2026
Translation Station
I found this oldie but goody in the booklet of prompts I send out/print for retreats. I think it will be a fun exercise for us, if you’re game!
Take someone else’s very short story (you can use Sticks by George Saunders or Dinosaur by Bruce Holland Rogers that are below or anything you like better) OR one of your own poems or essays; and regard it as if it was written in a foreign tongue and it is your job to translate it. Rewrite it, changing every single word.
Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod's helmet and Rod had to clear it with Dad if he wanted to take the helmet off. On the Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veteran’s Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was Dad's only concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve he shrieked at Kimmie for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup saying: good enough good enough good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first time I brought a date over she said: what's with your dad and that pole? and I sat there blinking.
We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile he lay the pole on its side and spray painted a rift in the earth. Mom died and he dressed the pole as Death and hung from the crossbar photos of Mom as a baby. We'd stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base: army medals, theater tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of Mom's makeup. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the string letters of apology, admissions of error, pleas for understanding, all written in a frantic hand on index cards. He painted a sign saying LOVE and hung it from the pole and another that said FORGIVE? and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and the sticks and left them by the road on garbage day.
"Dinosaur" by Bruce Holland Rogers
When he was very young, he waved his arms, snapped his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” his mother said. “You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!” Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. “Seriously,” his father said to him after school one day, “what do you want to be?” A fireman, maybe. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero.
But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he’d like to be a math teacher? That was respectable. Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it, because it made him feel, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse: a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things, important things, like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.
Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water’s edge.
Kill Your Darlings Reading Series
As I said a few weeks ago, the Dreamaway Reading series has moved to Darlings in Easthampton and is now called Kill Your Darlings Reading Series! The first one is THIS Saturday 3/21 from 4-6. I would love to see you!
Come watch 3 brilliant writers giving 15 minute performances at Darlings Bar + Cafe in Easthampton. Every other month. Hosted by Rachel Lyon, Emily Lackey, and ME.
March readers are:
Elena Azzoni is an Italian-American writer whose work explores identity, desire, and the long road back to the body. She is the author of A Year Straight (Seal Press, Hachette, 2011), and her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Elle, make/shift magazine, The Stephanie Miller Show, and feminist anthology, We Don't Need Another Wave (Seal Press, Hachette, 2006). Elena holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry from New College of California, where she studied under renowned activist poet, Judy Grahn. She also holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Social Thought & Political Economy from UMass, Amherst, and is currently pursuing an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Elena lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.Her debut novel, Tizzy, will be released in March 2026 by RISE BOOKS (Simon & Schuster).
Sara Rauch is the author of WHAT SHINES FROM IT: STORIES and XO. Her writing has most recently appeared in Vast Chasm, Cutleaf, The Spectacle, Revolute, and Paranoid Tree. She lives in Holyoke with her family. www.sararauch.com
Shea Mowat was born in Mainse to a lobsterman-artist and a social worker-seeker and has been pretty darn busy ever since. He is the author of a unique and reasonably priced ($1.99) pamphlet, 199 REASONS YOU SHOULDN'T PAY FOR THISS OVERPRICED PAMPHLET, which is enjoying its second printing by Looky Here Press, and the author/illustrator of an all-ages picture book, . . . DOT . . . , forthcoming (Spring of 2026_ from Boat in the Road Books. Shea has never left New England. He lives and works here with his darlin' wife and their two darlin' sons
Next Book Club!
Next book club is April 14th from 7-8:30 instead of Gen Writing. We’re reading Liz Moore’s God of The Woods which if you get started now should be a breezy read!
That’s it for this week, folks!
keep on keeping on!
XO
