MY UPCOMING NEW PUBLISHED WORDS

I'm so excited that advanced marketing has started for my upcoming poetry collection, The Other Side of Crazy to be released by 918studio this September.The collection explores the craziness of modern life. Reviews are already coming in:

“The trick in The Other Side of Crazy seems to be that it’s a place we cannot access, or perhaps does not exist. These poems are filled with startling images, both strange and commonplace: blood-soaked quilts, burning watches, calendars, thunderstorms, dead skin, pharmaceutical commercials, a bike ride across the emotional terrain of modern life. These poems are littered with interruptions—both internal & external—that are always biting at the heels at this contemporary normalcy & domesticity, and in the end, rather than being resisted or fretted upon or allowed to hold modern life hostage, they are embraced & incorporated into the living and crazy love these poems so deftly reflect.” ~ Ryan Collins      

“In The Other Side of Crazy, Jodie Toohey explores the frailty of relationships and modern life from her own unique perspective. She guides the reader ‘Through the valley/Of vulnerability/…Of agony over/Straits/Of jackets and jars.’ Her poems beat with palpable emotion, fearless and honest, evoking a rich, multi-layered world.” ~ Nancy Ann Schaefer, InSearch of Lode

"In her book, The Other Side of Crazy, poet Jodie Toohey proves to us that still waters do indeed run deep.  Her poetry collection proffers a brilliant disturbance of the intellectual mind that reassembles as creative genius.The poet conjures everyday moments of insanity in her work that gift us sanity, and that join all of us in a very human, very creative, coven of mad genius. These poems are like rare, black pearls, simple, beautiful, darkly iridescent, and a little sinister.  The Reader wears them in her heart and mind like a badge made of rare jewels that entitles her to a tour through The Other Side of Crazy with poet Toohey as the tour guide." ~ Ellen Tsagaris,Sappho,I should have listened

"Poet, author Jodie Toohey exhibits her diverse and creative poetic voice in The Other Side of Crazy. Her poems elicit  raw emotions and draw the reader to think about life from a different angle, from the other side of the proverbial box." ~ Trisha Georgiou, Quartered Enlightenment 

To read some samples, click here.

To craziness!

-The Wordsy Woman

HOW I WRITE ... POETRY

I never usually sit down and tell myself, "Okay, time to write some poetry." My poems usually come to me while I'm writing in my journal. I'll be writing away about mundane, every day life things and a poem will just come out in the process. Sometimes, as I'm writing my stream of consciousness, rambling writing, there will be a sentence or two, or even a few phrases, that I'll take and use to create poem.

Many of my poems are about tiny moments. They are something that just struck me as interesting so I wrote about them in as much detail as I possible could, and then I massaged the words into a poem. These are things like fog swirling over the Mississippi River on a February morning driving over the crest of a hill toward the water, the sheet of water from a sprinkler cascading over a green electrical box, or abandoned toys and roller skates in suburban yards on an early Sunday evening. I just notice them and write about them.

Some of my poems are seemingly random words that pop into my head. I just listen to the words flying through my mind and write them down. Many times I don't even know what the poem is about or, sometimes, that it will even be a poem. There have been several occasions where I'll re-read a set of lines I thought I just wrote randomly and think, "Hey, that's about..." I wrote a poem I entitled "Apology" this way.

My poems are mostly free verse. I don't follow any particular forms. Some of them rhyme and some of them don't; some of them partially rhyme and some don't rhyme at all. If a rhyming part comes to me, I include it but I don't force rhymes onto my poems. Most of my poetry is easy to understand and accessible, especially those in my book, Crush and Other Love Poems for Girls. There will be a few more abstract poems in my upcoming collection by 918Studio, The Other Side of Crazy, but even they are not terribly abstract.

As far as revising my poems, it's a matter of paring down. I cut any unnecessary or redundant words and tighten things up. I will count lines and syllables to see how close they are from stanza to stanza; if they are close, I'll revise to make them match as much as possible because I like symmetry. But, if they're too far apart, I just leave it as a free-wheeling, asymmetrical poem. Finally, I read them out loud to see how they sound to my ear and feel their rhythms.

Unlike articles or outlined novels, poems feel more elusive to me. They are something I catch like butterflies rather than sit down and produce.

Happy Writing!
-The Wordsy Woman

HOW I WRITE PREVIEW

It has occurred to me that though how people approach writing various subjects, genres, and, for lack of a better word, things, has similarities, it also has differences. So the next several weeks, I will be blogging about how I approach and "do" the things I write.

This is what I have in mind:

• Website copy writing
• Essays
• Poetry
• Novels
• Personal narrative or memoir
• Articles
• Blogs
• Social media posts
• Emails
• Journals

Today I'll talk a bit about how I approach my writing practice. I would love to say that I wake up every morning at five a.m., get right to writing, and have dozens of brilliant pages of copy by ten a.m. But, alas, that is not true. When I was working on one novel, I did get up an average of four mornings each week at 6:30 a.m. and wrote for a couple of hours before having to go to my at-the-time out-of-the-house job, but I did it reluctantly. Most mornings the only thing that motivated me to get out of bed was the thought of my rotting, pre-programmed coffee.

Nowadays, between taking graduate classes, doing volunteer work for Midwest Writing Center, and carting kids, I am a full-time writer. Though I am a full-time writer now, I'm always intending to spend more time actually writing. With a couple of recent regularly paying gigs, that is happening to a degree. As far as my writing practice, I really have no set schedule and no set routine.

I keep a three week spreadsheet of my days broken down into two hour blocks from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. that I fill in with my planned activities. This helps me to meet my deadlines and fit everything I want or need to accomplish into my schedule. It is a fluid and flexible plan so I probably never follow it exactly, but I know if I get groceries when I was scheduled to work on my blog, I'd better swap somewhere. I also keep a calendar with specific lists of tasks to complete in the week; I go by the week since my aforementioned general schedule changes so frequently.

Whether I write long hand with pen and paper or on the computer varies by what I'm working on. Generally, though, I type anything concrete I'm writing like an article but will go long hand for poetry and journal writing. I probably do write every day but not creatively and not always in the project where I want to be, but it is a process and work in progress. That's one of the great things about writing; if it doesn't work one way, you try something else.

Happy writing. I hope you enjoy my upcoming posts!

-The Wordsy Woman