In 1929, The Ohioana Library Association was founded by Ohio First Lady Martha Kinney Cooper. The purpose of Ohioana is to “collect, preserve, and promote the works of Ohio authors, artists, and musicians,” and one of its annual events is The Ohioana Book Festival.

Raccoons, possums, and groundhogs hold sway over my husband’s and my back deck, especially during the winter. There are only six condos on the unnamed lake where we live, but access to water and cozy spaces underneath the decks are such seductive hiding spots for wild animals that some critters flourish in ways that are less than welcome (to say the least).

When the cover of my poetry chapbook--Just the Girls: A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees--took second place in the AllAuthor.com Cover of the Month Contest (September 2020), I did not realize that one of the "perks" to winning was an author interview. Check it out!

February. 55 degrees in Charlotte, North Carolina, with sunshine.

Not bad. Great, in fact, when compared to Kent, Ohio, where today it is 19 cloudy degrees with snow. Even Reykjavik, Iceland, beats Ohio at 32 degrees and partly sunny—but it cannot touch Sarasota where the Gulf of Mexico side of Florida is sitting at 77 degrees with mostly sunny skies.

I live in a small town with lots of small towns nearby. The closest town—Kent—has many little boutique-style specialty shops. Red Letter Days (stationery, greeting cards, paper, vintage posters, socks with cheeky sayings, and more)—Popped (Ohio grown popcorn and other confectionaries)—Last Exit Books (an independent used bookstore)—McKay Bricker Framing (the only place to go to have something framed…but also beautiful jewelry, cards, glassware, and gifts)—Off the Wagon (toys, games, and quirky gifts)—and many others.

When I was little—growing up in Ohio’s Steel Valley—we had Sunday Blue Laws.

Blue Laws were a kind of lock-down every Sunday. Grocery stores were closed, as were shopping plazas and restaurants. In our neck of the woods, you might be able to find an open gas station—Lawson’s Convenience Stores were open—but nothing else. After church, people went home for Sunday dinner, ending the excitement of the day.

Happy New Year, 2021!

We’ve been waiting 12 long months to say hello to you, but now you are here, and I know that I’m glad to see you. You have no idea how challenging it was to deal with your older sibling—2020—last year. What a trauma! That’s what we get for letting 2020 take charge while we rolled over and went back to sleep.

2020 was a great year for poetry, new poetry books, and poets. The COVID-19 Pandemic—and resulting stay-at-home mandates—created lots of space for hiking, cooking, practicing yoga, and reading. When things go back to “normal,” I probably won’t have the same normal activities. Rather, I want to continue to save space for myself and continue doing these things that have been healthier and better for me. SO…my favorite poetry books this year, with just a teaser line from each…and with the hope that you will support my fellow poets by buying these books and diving in…

It is hard to imagine that 2020 could have any bright spots, but that’s not true. Many great things have come to pass this year.

Al and I walk the Towpath Trail along the Cuyahoga River on a cold, rainy Northeast Ohio day. No one else is on the trail; perhaps they do not trust—as we do—that the brief break in the weather will last long enough for a quick hike. But we believe we can squeeze it in—a chance to leave our house and get outside. In the pandemic, we sometimes have seemed to think that our outdoor opportunities have been limited, but that’s not really true. Nothing stands in our way. Properly garbed—today, rain jackets, hats, gloves, and the ever-present masks—we can sally forth with abandon, if we choose to do so.

I always was bound to someone else’s ideas, priorities, strategies…although I often was able to introduce and achieve my own goals. Also always…I found ways to include writing in my work. Letters. Speeches. Reports. White papers. The list goes on and on.

But now I am completely retired from those shackles and have turned my attention more fully to my own writing.

As it turns out, a pandemic is a great time to write. What else will I do? Well…of course…read! And hike!

How long can you keep a secret before you’re completely unraveled?

So begins Shawn Aveningo Sanders’s achingly honest chapbook of poems What She was Wearing (The Poetry Box Press, 2019), a chronicle of the sexual assault she suffered when she was in college.

When you are wobbling on one foot—arms extended overhead—trying to remember to breathe in and exhale slowly and thoughtfully, it is impossible to think of anything else.

Before I retired, my work at a local public radio station precluded me from volunteering as a poll worker on election day. It was the time-honored tenet that media professionals needed to maintain objectivity—no preference given to political party—that rightly kept me away.

Hiking in our local Metro Parks or in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park—dashing into the grocery store—going to the doctor or dentist—social distancing visits with my daughter and mother-in-law YES! Of course I wear a mask!

But—crazily—so many others either do not wear masks or they do not wear them correctly (the biggest offender in my eyes…mask resting below the nose, rendering it useless).

Hosting a multi-day event is challenging in the best of times. Choosing a date that does not conflict with other community events...Announcing and promoting RFPs, gathering those proposals, and inviting speakers…Recruiting volunteers…Soliciting sponsorships…Marketing…Securing a venue…Building the schedule…Tracking registrations. Pile a pandemic onto that seemingly endless list and you have a huge, complicated, potentially calamitous gathering.

It often is happenstance that leads me to stumble across wonderful yet lesser-known poems and poets. I unearth these little gems—sometimes from a Facebook post and, at other times, from articles or online literary magazines that guide me into deeper reading—and then I consume them from start to finish until I feel that I’ve gained a sense of the poet and his or her focus on that particular book or chapbook.

Years of writing—rejections galore—lots of individual poems published—then (finally…in January 2020) great news! My chapbook was accepted for publication!

Eureka!

My mother was zealously political. She claimed to have broken from her Republican-leaning family when she voted for Democrat Harry S. Truman in her first presidential election. She never regretted that decision, nor did she regret her decision to vote for Republican Ronald Reagon (for whom she campaigned). In the 1960s and 1970s, she rarely missed watching American broadcast journalist and CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite who, at that time, was known as the “most trusted man in America.” She was riveted to the TV for the Richard M. Nixon/Watergate Hearings, and she never apologized for her stand with Kent State University students after Ohio National Guardsmen killed 4 students and wounded another 9 (all of the students were unarmed).

In Celebration of Raw Data (Living in the Fallout from the Coronavirus)

As we move deeply into fall, Northeast Ohio is flaunting this splendid season. Leaves are turning from green to red and orange and yellow. Goldenrod—the bane of people with allergies—lights up meadows. Pumpkins and brilliantly colored chrysanthemums decorate front porches—as do Halloween decorations.