Saturday, January 16, 2016

Owl painting (acrylic on canvas: original version and black & white version)



A poem-a-day for all of 2016

Around the end of May 2015, I finished a 1000 day run of writing a poem-a-day. It was an amazing experience! While churning out so many new poems, I rarely had time to go back and look at what I was producing. Even now after many months, I have only revisited those years of poems while trying to organize manuscripts or poetry journal submissions. There were certainly many crappy poems. I had days in which I struggled to put together any words. I got more experimental and more "loose" in my approach to writing because of the dictates of having to get a draft done by midnight everyday for nearly three years.

When the run ended, I needed to take a break from writing and a break from poetry. Understandably. I didn't write any poems again until September 2015, when I once again joined The Grind, a monthly poem-a-day writing group that Ching-In Chen invited me to first try in December 2009. I wrote my September 2015 poems, and then walked away again. In the last month or so of 2015, I started feeling like I was ready for another run of creating new poems. I decided to join the January 2016 Grind writing group. I also secretly decided to try to write a new poem each day of 2016. Don't tell anyone please. I've already finished the first couple weeks, and I feel the creative juices bubbling in my body again.

This is my current writing journal. I paint the covers to personalize them.


Pet Paintings (Autio Christmas Party - January 2016)

By Storm Autio

By Storm and Donna Autio

By James Autio

By Donna and James Autio

By James Autio