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judyjordan

@puggrumbles

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Award winning poet, nonfiction writer, and creative writing professor My dog is posting an adventure story. See links. Substack is always free.

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Ever read something beautiful and think, I could never write that?

You’re seeing the finished piece. You aren’t seeing the work that brought it there.

My new Substack post lifts the hood on Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s “Steering into Winter” to explore what its camera work, verbs, comparisons, and sentence rhythms can teach us about revision.

Bring your imperfect draft. Link in bio.

#WritingCraft #Revision #CreativeNonfiction #CloseReading #WritersOfInstagram #Brevity #SarahFawnMontgomery by @puggrumbles

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3 days ago

Twenty-eight years ago today, Matthew Shepard was beaten and left tied to a fence outside Laramie.
I grew up hearing anti-gay hatred from a pulpit. When I came home for the holidays, my own family would not hug me because their preacher had convinced them that AIDS could spread through breathing.
Today’s lies about trans people are familiar to me. My research on the rise of fascism for my narrative nonfiction about a woman who rescued children from WWII concentration camps makes the claim that persecution is necessary to protect someone else also very familiar. My own experience being beaten as a child just for being seen talking to Black children makes that claim very familiar to me.

I wrote about that history, Trump’s rhetoric, and the people living with its consequences in “The Hatred We Are Being Taught.” Link in Bio on The Long Memory Substack always free

#MatthewShepard #LGBTQHistory #LGBTQRights #TransRights #StopHate #ReligiousTrauma #TheLongMemory by @puggrumbles

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7 days ago

In “Images Haunt, Part Two,” I look at the deep image: the image that creates atmosphere, reveals character and history, carries feeling, and makes an argument the poem never has to state. I’m thinking about the order in which a writer directs the eye, the physical world as an emotional landscape, and the moment when an image begins to think.

The essay includes work by Theodore Roethke, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, B. H. Fairchild, Michael McGriff, Jenna Bazzell, and Leslie Adams, among others. I’m grateful to these poets for the lines that have stayed with me and helped me think more deeply about what an image can carry.

New at The Work of the Sentence. Link in bio.

#PoetryCraft #WritingCraft #PoetryTeaching #DeepImage #CreativeWriting by @puggrumbles

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9 days ago

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the racist history of Union County, and this piece was a hard one. Researching Robert Williams and the violent history of Civil Rights in my home county and the world around it has been triggering my PTSD in ways I didn’t fully expect.
But this history is important. Not only because of what Black families endured, but also because racism damaged and divided white families, too. Almost every beating I got was because I'd been seen talking to Black children and I refused to name those children which could have gotten them killed. How racism divided families is often left untold. I barely even mention the abuse that happened to me in this piece. It is about Robert Williams, an important and often overlooked figure in the civil rights movement.
In any case, I'll keep going. This is one of the reasons I started The Long Memory: to look closely at the histories we inherit, the ones we bury, and what they still do to us. To not let history be buried. Please read and subscribe which is always free. Photo description: Robert Williams looking at a Wanted FBI poster of himself after he was falsely accused of kidnapping a white couple See link in bio #HiddenHistory #NorthCarolinaHistory #CivilRightsHistory #TheKissingCase #RobertFWilliams #UnionCountyNC #AmericanHistory #HistoryMatters #TheLongMemory #HistoricalResearch by @puggrumbles

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15 days ago

I’ve been thinking about the images in poems that stay with us long after we’ve forgotten the rest of the poem.
My new Work of the Sentence essay looks at how writers make those images happen: the difference between simply reporting what a camera could see and creating an image that carries emotion, character, memory, and pressure. I talk about verbs, secondary images, deeper images, and the kinds of details that keep haunting the reader.
The essay is up now on Substack. Link in bio.
#poetrycraft #poetrycommunity #writingcraft #poetrywriting #creativewriting #imagery #writingtips #writersofinstagram
@ironoakeditions @lsupress @tinderboxeditions @gnashingteethpublishing by @puggrumbles

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17 days ago

I thought I knew a fair amount about the history of racism in this country. I've studied our history, written about the KKK, segregation, and how, starting at the age of eight, I was beaten, sometimes with a gun held to my head, sor something as simple as being seen talking to Black neighbors or schoolmates.

And still, I had never heard of William White.

In 1908, White was used as a human target in a racist carnival game. White customers paid to throw balls at his head. A group of baseball players brought heavier balls and injured him so badly that he was carried to a hospital. Then the historical record lost him.

The game was not an aberration. It appeared for decades at carnivals, church fairs, civic celebrations, amusement parks, and children’s camps across the United States.

We remember the bright tents, the Ferris wheel, the smell of fried dough and trampled grass. We do not remember the Black man behind the canvas, waiting for the next hit.

My new essay for The Long Memory:

“The Target Was a Man”

Link in bio.

Content note: racist violence and redacted racial slurs from the historical record.

#TheLongMemory #BlackHistory #AmericanHistory #HiddenHistory #HistoricalMemory #WilliamWhite by @puggrumbles

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23 days ago

How little story does a poem need?

Sometimes five words in a title can do all the narrative housekeeping. Sometimes a conditional can do it. Sometimes a single date.

In my new Substack, I look at how poets move story out of the poem’s way, freeing image, imagination, and music to do their deeper work. I include poems by Joelle Bielle, Liselle Mueller, and Gregory Orr as well as by @themeanderingpoet Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's“Tonight,” subtitled April 16, 2007, and the way grief enters the ear and body before the mind fully understands what has happened.

A teaching essay based on Greg Orr's The Four Temperaments of Poetry about story, sound, imagination, memory, and how poems can work when direct statement is not enough. #PoetryCraft #PoetryTeaching #CreativeWriting #PoetryCommunity #SubstackWriters @siualumassociation @ironoakeditions @gnashingteethpublishing @tinderboxeditions @lsupress

Link in bio. by @puggrumbles

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a month ago

Still Life with Bucket (excerpt)

September has gathered everything into one black bowl:
pears freckled gold, tomatoes lit like small lamps,
one peach keeping the last blush of summer,
and among them the pale hinges of a body,
a jaw, a small skull, each bone washed clean
by weather and the patient mouths of insects.

Fruit ripens toward sweetness. Bone ripens toward light.
They lie against each other,
the peach beside the empty socket,
green leaves curling over both.

#PoetryBook #Poetry #IndiePress#PoetsWithDisabilities #DisabledPoet #QueerPoets #PoetsOfInstagram #AmbulatoryWheelchairUser #ChronicPainWarrior
#PoetsofInstagram #WritersOfInstagram #InstaPoetry
#NarrativeLyric #ironoakeditions #lsupress #gnashingteethpress by @puggrumbles

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a month ago

https://writingthelongmemory.substack.com/p/the-ugly-laws-and-the-right-to-be?r=97cai&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Ugly Laws and the Right to be Seen: substack post about the "ugly" laws and how they are rearing their heads once again. Also, including the time a famous actress made sure I knew what she thought about wheelchair users. Always free. Please subscribe. #SusanSarandon #Susanloveseveryone #disability #wheelchairusers #littleknownhistory #historymatters #historyfacts #wheelchairsmeanfreedom #geenadavisorg #ironoakeditions #tinderbox #LSU #gnashingteethpress by @puggrumbles

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a month ago

https://writingthelongmemory.substack.com/p/what-history-buries-the-land-remembers?r=97cai&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I’ve started a new Substack called The Long Memory, where I’ll be writing about history, memory, buried stories, forgotten lives, and the things that somehow survive attempted erasure. I will also be writing about the nonfiction narrative I've been working on about Diana Budisavljević and her helpers who managed to pull over fifteen thousand children from the WWII Croatian death camps then were nearly forgotten after the war. Forthcoming books of poetry and excerpts from my memoir may also make appearances along with sundown towns, ugly laws, lynchings, and mass atrocities we try so hard, in this country, to bury and forget.
The first essay is called “What History Buries, the Land Remembers.” It begins with a few lines from my forthcoming poetry collection, What the Land Remembers, and moves into something I’ve felt for most of my life: that land is full of secrets and, perhaps, even is cursed. Now, thanks to microdosing ketamine and the huge lessening of my cPTSD, I can finally write about it. @ironoakeditions #LSUpress #gnashingteethpress

Photo is of Diana Budisavljević and some of the thousands of children she rescued by @puggrumbles

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2 months ago

I have started a substack. Two in fact. Free. No paid subscription. I plan on posting everything I know about how to write on The Work of The Sentence and interesting and mostly buried history on The Long Memory https://judyjordanwriter.substack.com/p/greg-orrs-the-four-temperaments?r=97cai&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true A manuscript of poems with handwritten revisions and stickers by @puggrumbles

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2 months ago

From the nonfiction I'm working on about a woman who rescued over 15,000 children from WWII death camps. There's little written or published about her in English and no books or movies written or published in English speaking countries. Her story deserves to be told. #ChildrenOfTheSava #BookQuote #HistoricalNonfiction #WWIIHistory
#WorldWarII #HiddenHistory #ForgottenHistory #Resistance
#TruthMatters #bookstagram #Querying #agents #WomenInHistory
#HolocaustHistory #BalkanHistory
#WritingCommunity by @puggrumbles

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4 months ago