Newsletter 22
Put It To Rest: April Poetry Month Challenge
Calls for Submissions, Announcements, and Highlights
Calls for Submissions
Put It To Rest, is putting out a special call for submissions for poems that celebrate healing and empowerment through storytelling.
According to the article, Trauma Distorts Our Sense of Time and Self:
Traumatized people can lose their life story
Tran remembers her mother’s words, but other details of the abuse she experienced as a child are fuzzier. That’s common among people who experience trauma [who] “have both an excess and depletion of memory,” says cognitive neuroscientist Elisa Ciaramelli of the University of Bologna in Italy.
How memory changes among trauma survivors remains controversial, write the authors of a 2021 opinion piece in Frontiers in Psychology. But mounting evidence suggests that people tend to remember stressful memories in detail. As the mind fixates on those traumatic memories, memories unrelated to the trauma seem to fade, while new memories fail to register.
WRITING PROMPT:
How and when did you or are you rewriting your life story? What story did you tell yourself in the past? How has telling yourself a new story empowered you to then share your story through writing to Put It To Rest?
- Tag #Put It To Rest and #Poetry Month
- Use the subtitle or leader “Poetry Month Challenge”
- Poems will be featured on a special feature page for the month of April.
- Please submit the poem anytime during the month of April!
Announcements
Lindsay Soberano Wilson, creator and editor of Put It To Rest, encourages its members, and any other interested Medium members, to join the Fine Lines Spring Writing Conference to kickstart National Poetry Month on the weekend of April 1st and 2nd.
Register at Finelines.org
Lindsay is presenting a workshop and poems from 12–1 EST.
Recent Poems, Personal Articles, and Short Stories
Put It To Rest wants to thank its writing community for all that you do. As our community grows we encourage other writers to engage with one another through reading, highlighting, commenting, and collaborating.
Welcome to our newest contributor Amanda Justice!
Prose
Charlie Cole’s I Miss Who I Was Before the Pandemic
There have been moments that cut through this and I feel a glimmer of who I was when I was better able to make my way. Oh, right, this is how it feels to go to a party or meet someone for lunch or run multiple errands in one day. I remember when this took less effort and energy from me, which quickly turns into mourning.
Margie Willis’s My Midwinter Maternal Void
In many ways, mom inadvertently snubbed me for my entire adult life since I had no interest in producing offspring for her to fawn over. I didn’t care. I dropped in on that obligatory family scene only intermittently. I would rather go backpacking on holidays than fawn over nieces and nephews hoping I wouldn’t get stuck changing diapers. Eating so much rich food that I couldn’t wait to go home and slip into a coma.
Anne Shark’s A House Plant Teaches Me About Relationships
“I’m sitting here staring at this plant,” I continued. “And the thing has this one branch that stretches up so tall, reaching to the window, to the sun, as if toward joy. And it keeps falling over because it’s in this tiny little pot. And I keep picking it up, again and again, but then it grows more, reaches higher, and falls over again.
Amanda Justice’s My Experience Trying to Talk Someone Out of Suicide
I just wanted to convey that on some level, I could empathize with them because I did understand some of what they were going through. I told them about a friend of mine who had survived a suicide attempt a few years ago, and who only told me about her struggle after she ended up hospitalized.
Chris Patton’s Where Are The Words
My thoughts and feelings blur together as fragmented pieces of both the past and present. The words are cumbersome. Like I’m trying to speak in a foreign language that I don’t know, and no one has heard of. It’s frustrating. It’s isolating and lonely.
Dominik Formanowicz’s First Week On Antidepressants: Ready To Start Considering OnlyFans
Don’t get me wrong, this long process of discovery is far from over. Nevertheless, I can say with a degree of confidence that I see what is happening when it’s happening. It doesn’t mean I always know what to do with it — hell, no! — but the awareness is there.
Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s The More Progressive Society Is, The More Regressive We Become…
If individuals are preoccupied with safety and basic needs, then how does that impact the well-being of society? But I’m not talking about the well-being of physical health only, but mental and spiritual health too.
Poetry
Theodore McDowell’s To a Vietnam Veteran
And yet,
he is not confined to his trauma.
There are rare moments
with his grandson
when they gently cup fireflies
in their hands
and call them magic lanterns.
They release them
back into twilight.
Richard Steele’s Paraffin
Over time, a piece removed here, cut away there;
the room heated too high, melting the wax
until it oozed and dripped into places unwanted,
the detritus scraped and cast aside,
and never seen again.
Anthony O'Dugan’s Where We Lie
Ten years now
still only betrothed —
another why which occurs
in their ghost-speak —
yet one that weighs heavy
as well on my mind.
Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s What You’re Meant To Hold
When life becomes
too hard to hold
like a piping-hot rock
that you pick up
and drop —
Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s Butterflies In My Belly
The butterflies had their way
with you this week
but it doesn’t mean
they will feed on you next week
when you settle them
with nourishment.
Open for Submissions
Put It To Rest celebrate the light after the rain and inspires writers to explore their voices to tell their stories and finally “put them to rest.”
So if your writing is raw and vulnerable and you’re ready to put it to rest, then consider joining our growing community of poets, essayists, and short story writers.
Put It To Rest accepts personal essays, poetry, and short stories about life experiences that have weighed on your mental health and that you wish to explore through writing as a therapeutic endeavor.
House your work here to Put It To Rest where you can grow as a writer and eventually be featured on Our Writers page.
I am happy to be an editor and help others grow their audience and improve their writing. I want to also help those who consider themselves new to writing to tell their story and reap the benefits of this exercise.
I want to help you to tell your story.
*Please follow the submission guidelines so we can do so together!*
Support the Put It To Rest writing community by following us across all social media platforms, including Medium, Twitter, and Instagram.
Lindsay Soberano-Wilson is a poet, teacher, and editor of Put It To Rest and iPoetry. Hoods of Motherhood: A Collection of Poems is forthcoming in May 2023 (Prolific Pulse Press LLC). Casa de mi Corazón: A Travel Journal of Poetry and Memoir explores inner and outer travel in discovering self-identity as a Jewish Canadian. Her poems and articles have appeared in FreshVoices, Embrace of Dawn, Poetry 365, PoetryPause, Quills Erotic Canadian Poetry Magazine, Canadian Woman Studies Journal, Fevers of the Mind, and Poetica Magazine. Find her on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
