Current Obsessions
It's a gloomy mid-April Saturday in 2018 that refuses to be spring, & I'm obsessed with, in no particular order:
teaching fourth graders flexible thought
collapsing the hierarchy between artist & audience
humor as a strategy for post-traumatic stress growth
Mina Loy, Marilyn Monroe & Brigitte Bardot
the market price of my biological clock
the impossible burger
crafting an alternative narrative to our peculiar notion of adults as Survivors

Work in the World
I'm currently touring with my poetry board game, Dr. Carr's Word Forage.
As I see it, Dr. Carr's Word Forage is a necessary intervention into the current cultural suspicion about poetry's relevance, and an antidote to that peculiar public school predilection for teaching poetry as something be consumed.
In his 1991 Atlantic article titled “Can Poetry Matter?,” Dana Gioia argues that “poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized.”
Dr. Carr’s Word Forage is a strategy for getting poetry out of the classroom, for restoring its vitality and unleashing its energy, for breaking poetry’s exhausted conventions and sharing poetry in a new way, that matters. The number of recent publications dedicated to asserting poetry’s relevance is proof that we need new strategies for releasing readers released into poetry—not as an escape from “the pressure of the real” but as a place where we can turn imagination into action and explore possibilities rather than positions.
Contact me to book Dr. Carr's Word Forage for your classroom, fundraiser, artwalk, corporate retreat etc: ifshedrawsadoor@gmail.com
Work in Progress
After 8+ years in the making, my first collection of fiction, Name Your Bird Without A Gun, is forthcoming from Spork Press next year & I couldn't be more delighted to add prose to my resume!
After 3+ years in the visionary stages, I'm finally translating The Emergency of Feeling Manual into an actual manuscript. In this hybrid creative nonfiction collection, I:
tell the kinds of stories we just don’t tell (like surviving suicide and forgiving yourself for infidelity),
explore the moral distinctions and ambiguities around issues (such as fertility and body image) that continue to be subject-defining choices for women
offer questions in lieu of answers