Check out the Southwest Word Fiesta coming to Western New Mexico University in Silver City on August 29th:
Southwest Word Fiesta at WNMU!
Category: Poem
Desert Exposure Winners!
Southern NM’s Desert Exposure arts and culture magazine just selected LCW’s own Karen Ray for Grand Prize for her poem “Flying with Sheets” that recollects the idyll of youth growing up in the desert. It reminded me of hitching those spring winds with a sheet fashioned into a sail and attached to a ten speed, all part of my own crazy, experimental youth.
Multiple winner Efram Carrasco won Prose Honorable Mention for “The Desert Girl,” and many other local writers won awards as well.
Finally, LCW’s Charmayne Samuelson’s new biography Spencer MacCallum Memories – Mystique – Mata Ortiz is discussed in the same issue.
To check out all these great works, you can read the PDF or pick up a copy locally.…
Still Life Musings: A Small Haiga Collection
Las Cruces Writers author Fenton Kay publishes again! His book of poetry, Still Life Musing: A Small Haiga Collection is now available on Lulu Press.
A haiga is like a haiku but combines images or paintings with the text of the poem. Fenton’s work, which I had the pleasure of critiquing and editing last year, builds imagery around people, places, plants, and creatures in his world.…
Fenton Kay wins award!
Las Cruces Writers is thrilled that our own Fenton Kay has won Honorable Mention for his poem, “Rainstorm in Juarez,” from Desert Exposure magazine! I can’t publish it here because it is slated for the November/December issue of the magazine, but I give you a consolation poem from Fenton about rain in the desert:
Sonoran Desert
Winter storm torrents –
Rain-soaked earth brings a lily
To the summer’s kiln.…
A Merry Writing Christmas
From Your Friends at Las Cruces Writers
’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Only the writer was stirring, with keyboard and mouse;
The plots were developed and outlined with care,
In the hopes that inspiration would soon be there;
The characters were diagrammed and what was said,
Had morphed into dialog that prattled along in his head;
And the imagery for the story and all that artistic crap,
Rumbled in his brain before his long winter’s nap,
When down on the page there arose a great natter,
His typing and corrections tried to calm the strange matter.
From his fertile mind the ideas did flash,
But the scenes he created always would clash.
A poem of Christmas, of hope, and snow,
Or a play about New Year’s stolen by a crow?
A miniature world constructed of spore,
Or a space-fairing mouse determined to explore?
The imagery flew in scenes so vivid and wild,
He sipped at a scotch to calm his inner child.
Then came the verbiage in novelistic verisimilitude,
And then waves of editing to calm the cacophonous and rude.
The work expanded and he started to pace,
As the night deepened cold, he saw traces of grace.
He typed and he sipped and he walked and he sang,
His phone was silenced and never once rang.
By dawn he was finished and looked at his work,
Then logged onto TikTok where he perfected his twerk.
A poem about writing on a long Christmas night,…