Author: penwithlit

It was a good thing at school
or the office where I'm paid
to sit still and think
for eight hours a day
but it's a problem
the rest of the time

Does she want to be more than friends?
Why hasn't she texted me back?
Am I being too clingy?

Like a vaudeville plate spinning act
my thoughts spiral to desperation
I should learn to trust my instincts

I'm a moth and she's the flame
I just have to accept the singed wings

About the Poet:

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a collection of poets and poetry lovers in the Triangle region of North Carolina. His first poetry collection, Wednesday Night Regular, written in and about strip clubs, was published in 2013. His second, Milkshakes and Chilidogs, a chapbook of food inspired poetry was served in 2017. He was…

The Rose Leopard is a debut novel that’s now two decades old. The author, secondary school teacher Richard Yaxley, has gone on to have a distinguished literary career, receiving an OAM (Order of Australia) in 2011 for services to education, literature and performing arts. He writes across genres, and has won or been nominated for many awards, mainly in YA and Children’s Lit.  The following is a list of his novels from his website:

• Harmony (Scholastic 2021; Long-listed for the ARA Historical Prize – CYA Section)
• A New Kind of Everything (Scholastic 2020)
• The Happiness Quest (Scholastic 2018; CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers 2019)
• This Is My Song (Scholastic 2017; ACU Book Of The Year 2019; Winner of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Literature; Finalist in the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards; also published in the Czech Republic by Albatros Media)
• Joyous and Moonbeam (Scholastic…

I had made small drawings as preparations for paintings before. I like using pastel when I work directly from a motif because it’s so easy to use. You open the box of pastels and begin drawing. There’s no mixing of paints (though you can blend sticks of color together on the page). And as the light changes, you find that you’ve spent most of the time actually describing the scene rather than pausing for cleaning a brush or refreshing the paint. Then the drawings are there to use to create a painting, and the painting is thus slightly removed from the actual objects and opens a passage for imagination. Or so it seems to me. Every artist has his own way of working that feels right.

I paint in different ways. The idea of creating fully realized drawings to then…