Month: May 2020

Broken Womb, Shattered Soul: Living with Infertility (part 3)

The final section of my article on infertility is up on Phoebe,MD: Medicine + Poetry. Links to the other sections are provided. I am grateful to Phoebe and her beautiful site for being a major part of my journey with memoir writing.

HEALTH + INSPIRATION

By Barbara Leonhard | Featured Contributor

[Click forPart 1andPart 2]

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The bandage torn
From new flesh
Releases wails
The wound still
Imbibes air
The scab hides
deep repair
Let it rest. Wait
In time the scar
Records a fate

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I learned that healing is a deep process. We may heal a physical wound, but to become whole, we need to heal emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. We need to dig into the old grout of our deep being. Moreover, we must trust help is available.

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Blonde-haired, Blue-eyed Adventures

A heart-warming post on a father’s love for his daughter. Follow his other links to the other stories and poems for her in the book.

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Blonde-haired, Blue-eyed Adventures

From March 1999 to July 2001, I wrote a series of stories for my daughter. They were eight short tales of the adventures of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl, each written after the adventure and shared with her. The last was written after she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, shortly before her ninth birthday.

For years, I’ve wanted to collect them into a book, and I finally sat down and did that last month. A photo/sketch accompanies each story, and the book closes with a bedtime poem that I wrote following her diagnosis. The photo on the front cover is of Alyssa at her first Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation “Walk to Cure Diabetes,” in 2002. I even managed to finish it before her wedding, which is in two weeks. I gave it to her this month for her birthday, and she loves it. And, I’m a…

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Broken Womb, Shattered Soul: Living with Infertility (part 2)

Thank you, Phoebe! I hope my story continues to help others who have had to deal with infertility.

HEALTH + INSPIRATION

By Barbara Leonhard | Featured Contributor

[Click here for Part 1]

Depression developed and flourished because I grieved so much over loss of fertility.

Women who are childless miss out on a great deal. They never feel what it is like to have a life growing, kicking and wiggling inside of them; to cry out during the birth of a baby (a rite of passage to celebrate with girlfriends); to watch over and even to grow with a child through sickness and health, all the milestones of birthdays, graduations, marriage, and the births of grandchildren. I have even grieved not being able to be the tooth fairy, help my kids find Easter eggs, read them bedtime stories, take them to the zoo.

Feeling apart from and not a part of the tribe still saddens me. I find I am left out of conversations about all those life passages women…

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PR for Poets & How Do I Promote My Books with Chronic Illness and a Disability? – guest blog post by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Trish Hopkinson

My new book from Two Sylvias Press, PR for Poets, is a guide for beginning to mid-career poets to learn how to build an audience and promote their books! Think of it as a guide to getting read.

People have asked me specifically about how do I, as a poet with a disability and chronic illness (I have MS, among other things), manage to promote my own books?

It’s a great question because not every writer is able to hop on a bus and couch-surf across the country to promote their book, and not everyone is able to work in academia and have a built-in support system. I think trying to promote a book with MS is probably similar to the way lots of people who are limited in time and money, or tied to day jobs and families and unable to travel, manage to promote their work. I…

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Sunday Best: phantom

My poem “Dark Apostle” ranked top of three best chosen for this past week’s challenge, Phantom. My sister, Martha Harris, created the digital image, “The Devil’s in the Details”. Thank you FREE VERSE REVOLUTION! (UPDATE: This poem is archived - the link no longer works - because FREE VERSE REVOLUTION has a new literary magazine.... Continue Reading →

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TP Haiku and Sunday Chat with Steve 3/15/20, the one where I thank old friends of the Cafe

Kind remarks from a wonderful support to writers!

Go Dog Go Café

White square rarity What else can serve your purpose? No one wants to know ~ Em C. 3.14.20

TP Haiku

Go Dog Go Cafe friends, baristas and guests… some of you may recall that the idea of an Internet coffee shop for writers was inspired by an exchange I had with Poet Girl Em a few years back. So when Christine approached me about starting a collective, I merged the Go Dog Go Treetop idea she and I had bantered about in comments with the Coffee Shop idea Em and I had bantered about and the Go Dog Go Cafe was born. Check out the About page for details…

Anywho… Em had been pretty quiet around these Word Press parts but she has come back with a humorous flourish with this haiku! Take the time to visit the First Friend of the Cafe and a dear old blogging friend of…

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Broken Womb, Shattered Soul: Living with Infertility (part 1)

Phoebe, MD:Medicine + Poetry Has just published the first part of an article I wrote on my infertility caused by Diethylstilbestrol, or DES. Although this drug is no longer prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages, it has been shown that this drug affected not only daughters and sons born between 1941 and 1971 but also their children. This is my story as a DES Daughter.

 

HEALTH + INSPIRATION

By Barbara Leonhard | Featured Contributor

As we grow and develop, we learn how to identify with many labels or roles, such as daughter/son, aunt/uncle, mother/father, and grandmother/grandfather, to name a few. It seems as though our stories are written before we are born to conform to these labels. In a way, these roles become rituals that comfort us as we agree to them and even expect our lives to go “as planned” based on our social codes and blueprints for survival.

I know I certainly expected my life to unfold much like my mother’s life did with marriage and family. She had seven children, and being the second oldest and oldest girl, I was able to help with all the babies she had. It never occurred to me that I would never be able to have my own children. Little did I know that my helping her at…

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Three Flakes on the Front Door by Barbara Leonhard (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

I’m so delighted that Silver Birch Press published my poem “Three Flakes on the Front Door“. Last winter, these three cut outs of snow flakes appeared on our front door. I took a picture. We never found out who gifted the designs. However, it inspired a poem!

Silver Birch Press

door 1Three Flakes on the Front Door
by Barbara Leonhard

Front doors, gateways to stories
held in the arms of lovers.
Brides and babies travel
over thresholds that welcome
spring’s warm breeze, summer’s first bees,
autumn’s tumbling leaves, winter’s freeze
for child play in drifts of snow
cushioning the stalwart door,
where Mystery gifts

three flakes, cut-out lives
of transient travel
through passageways to greet
weddings, rituals, blessings,
celebrations, holidays,
date nights, lives guarded
by peepholes
and double-bolt locks
until the last flake
melts.

Clothed in frayed lives,
the dead flutter as birds
released
from their cages
out the front gate
into new gardens.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I find the concepts of doors, portals, and passageways inspiring. One winter day, someone pasted cutouts of three snowflakes on our modest front door. In this poem, I see the three snowflakes as metaphorical for the transience of seasons and the stages of…

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