This is a picture of an issue of my beloved Nimrod. It’s also (warning! self-advertising!) an issue I especially love, and not simply because I’m included within the pages.

It’s one of my favourites because even when I was very young, I loved older people. My very best friends were my old ladies: my grandmothers, my great-aunts, the old ladies we called Grandma who were no kin at all. But Grandma Shanks & Grandma Pietzel & Grandma Whisenhunt (only 3 of several) were part of my family. With stories as wonderful as their home cooking.

I can live, I think sometimes, on stories. On poetry and song lyrics and music w/ words and the lightening quick detonation of a haiku or tanka. They feed me in ways only birds and light can, otherwise.

So to be going to the Nimrod Weekend today is HUGE! Tonight I get to sit with more than 100 readers & writers, listening to poets & fiction writers read. I get to catch up with some of my dearest friends, and the people who know a side of me I don’t often share with strangers: geeky writer chick. And tomorrow a WHOLE DAY of the same!

Because I’m NUTS about writing: learning about it, talking about it, teaching it, doing it. I can talk poetics and prosody until you fall out of your chair snoring. Or the nuances of line breaks. And don’t forget about things like voice, and movement, and lyric and to capitalise or not to capitalise and…Hopeless, I know. 🙂

But our passions are what make our hearts our own. What we love is like a mirror showing who we are. Me? I’m a writer. Writing has been a life sustainer for me for many years, always an integral element of who I am. And Nimrod has been there for me since I was 18, sitting as a young poet writing sonnets in Nimrod Senior Editor Fran Ringold’s poetry class.

So to have Nimrod Weekend as part of the weekend ramp-up to National Day of Writing is beyond cool.  And since this year’s Nimrod theme is “Hunger & Thirst: Fulfilling Desire,” the Day of Writing theme “write2connect” is a perfect sequel.

This weekend, I’ll be feeding my writing hungers & thirsts. Drinking & eating my way through line after line of poetry & prose. All so that I can better connect. With the world of readers, with my own inner world, with beginner’s heart. How great is that?