Today is the winter solstice, aka the darkest day of the year. There are fewer minutes of daylight today than on any other day.
It’s my favorite day, not because I don’t like light but because I do. I love light, and if today is the shortest day, then we start getting longer days tomorrow. It’s like hitting rock bottom but knowing you will have the strength to climb back up.
That’s why I wrote my book Winter Solstice, which is now in print in my “Author’s Edition”. This is a day we don’t always appreciate or even note, but it’s worth remembering if there’s a down, there’s usually an up that follows.
I’m exploring a connection between haiku and sonnets again. I did it once before with a haiku by Matsuo Basho. I like the way that one turned out, and as I’m either at an impasse with my novel or at least a long hesitation, I thought I’d try to break out of it by writing a haiku and turning it into a sonnet.
It’s not the most cheerful of poems. In fact, as I wrote the sonnet, I began thinking about how we all try to hang onto our youth and how that can appear. I used to think I’d prefer to age gracefully, now I’m working out daily, trying things I’ve never tried before, dying my hair pink…it all feels right, but maybe it’s not?
Then again, if you never had a chance to bloom in spring, maybe you take the opportunity when you find it.
fall shadows don’t flatter your rosy vernal blossoms it’s too late for you
Out of Season By Michelle Garren-Flye
What are you doing here, little pink bloom? It’s obvious to all your time is long past and putting off death just creates gloom. Your beauty offends, you weren’t meant to last.
You weren’t meant for this kind of shadow when even the sunlight is just a tad too gold casting bare limbs in an unearthly glow as a wind shivers by, leaving you cold.
I’ll have to bury you in the dry, brown leaves. Remember how they looked in your youth? That’s when your beauty was sure to please! Now I’m afraid, it seems uncouth.
Stay buried please, accept what’s been done; for flurries and frigid winds, the time has come.
Photo and poem copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye
Winter Solstice was my second book, published in 2011 by Lyrical Press, now part of Kensington Press. It was a fun story to write and I was thrilled to have two books published by Lyrical Press, but Winter Solstice, unlike Secrets of the Lotus, was never published as a paperback. So I’ve never had it at my store, so it really feels new!
I was super hesitant to republish Winter Solstice because I actually got a lot of great feedback on the cover, lol. Everybody liked the bare-chested man on it, and the model (yes, he really exists) actually contacted me for information about my book way back (his name is Jason Aaron Baca and if you google him, you’ll find out he’s been on the covers of 500+ romance novels—look out Fabio!). He offered to post the cover on his web page, and if you want to see his other novel covers check it out here. Of course, the cover of Winter Solstice is long since crowded out by the others that have come since then, but I’m sure it’s still there somewhere.
Jason, if you’re still out there somewhere, I had to say goodbye to my old cover in order to republish my book, but still appreciate my little brush with celebrity. 🙂
My new cover probably won’t get that kind of attention, but I did design it myself. Thanks to Canva, I’ve gotten pretty handy at the cover design thing, and it saves money, which, as a bookstore owner and indie author I definitely appreciate!
Below, you’ll find the new cover and blurb for Winter Solstice: Author’s Edition. I hope you enjoy. I’ll have copies in my store next week!
Is it a one-night stand or a lifetime romance?
Becky Gray, newest public relations guru for Buncombe County Hospital in Asheville, N.C., does not do one-night stands. Until she meets sexy ER doc John Grant. He’s got a reputation as a womanizer, and Becky tries to stay away, but she finds herself inevitably drawn to him. It doesn’t help that her first assignment involves writing a blog about John and the hospital’s award-winning Emergency Department. For his part, John finds Becky unique combination of strength and vulnerability intriguing. When the two are thrown together in the crisis situations of the Emergency Room, they can’t help but find comfort in their mutual attraction.
Becky never meant for it to be more than one night. John never even meant for it to happen. Where do they go from here?
There’s nothing like a mountain fog. It’s hard to put it into words. I remember when I was a kid growing up in Brevard, N.C., I loved foggy mornings. Waiting at the bus stop, I felt like the sky had fallen on me, soft and cool and protective. Later, as a grown-up navigating mountain roads in the fog, I still felt that mystical sense of otherworldliness.
For the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time poring over pictures of flattened, flooded towns and videos of raging, red rivers full of debris. It’s hard for me to believe this is what’s left of some of the beautiful mountains where I grew up. I’ve lived on the eastern side of the state long enough to know there’s probably more saltwater in my veins than the red clay of the mountains now, but at times like this, I know there’s no denying it.
The coast may have been my destiny, but the mountains are my origin.
I haven’t been back in nearly two years. My mother passed away in February 2023 and I went back for her funeral. After that, my father moved down to Charlotte to be with my uncle and my older brother, and my mountains were just two hours too far to go.
I wonder how it became this hard to take time to get somewhere that’s still important to me.
I heard today that Interstate 40 Westbound was closed at Statesville to stop people wanting to get into the mountains—searching for friends and family, most likely, but maybe just curious. Maybe people like me who suddenly realized that the mountains of their origin might not always be there. The towns we grew up in can be wiped off the earth’s slate.
I’ve heard that Brevard survived, for the most part, in spite of being walloped with 30 inches of rain. But I’ve seen nothing to support that. There’s a webcam in downtown Brevard that is currently offline. I check it daily, sometimes hourly. I know it will likely be days or weeks before it comes back online, if it even survived, but still. It would be reassuring to see.
So little communication is possible, even with my brother and his family who still live there. I’ve gotten a few texts. He managed one phone call to my father.
I feel like the entirety of the North Carolina mountains is shrouded in fog now, but unlike the fog of my childhood, this is not protective, it’s a reminder. Nothing is permanent. Everything can be damaged or taken away.
Yesterday I posted a semi-free verse poem based on a Tarot reading. It got some good feedback. For some reason, recently, I’ve been fascinated with poetic form and transforming poetry to different forms. Today I was reading sonnets (classic stuff, not mine), and it occurred to me that yesterday’s free verse would read really well as a sonnet.
Or does it?
You can judge. Here’s yesterday’s post. Let me know in the comments!
On Receiving a Tarot Warning of You By Michelle Garren-Flye
Just for today, promise me the world, even if it’s just a pack of cards. I’ll dance about, my wings unfurled, cavort until the fall of the stars. Judge me harshly, naked and cold, standing alone in my own grave. Wash me away in the coming flood! New beginnings are only for the brave. The dark man glowers, my love he denies, promises made in Cupid’s embrace. I will bare my heart, my soul to your cries, but our abstract romance never takes place. Through sunset’s blood, Death sweeps and star’s life out of the pitcher leaks.
Photo and Poem copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye
On Receiving a Tarot Warning of You By Michelle Garren-Flye
Which numbers more, the chirp of crickets or the sparkle of the stars?
Today you promise me the world but it’s a pack of cards. Dance! Let your wings unfurl before we all fall down.
Oh, will the judgment be enough or leave us standing naked and cold in our own graves surrounded by the flood? Rejoice in new beginnings and your past will reward you.
I fear the dark, glowering man on the throne, his staff held casually, bruisingly on a booted leg. When will he leave me, let me be alone? Can I knock the crown from his head?
I search for the promised love, bare my soul and body before Cupid’s embrace, but romance still seems far away and likely to avoid me—or lay me low.
Death’s scythe continues its sweep, cutting back excessive joy of life, Distant sunset blood does creep and brings along fear of living only in strife.
Only promise me the song of the stars, and pour out your life to the babbling river.
Photo and Poem Copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye
Today I did something kind of fun. I have a book of Matsuo Basho’s haiku on my desk that I often read when I’m experiencing writer’s block. It’s a beautiful book even though now it’s a bit beat up and coffee-stained. But the pages are full of haiku by the master of haiku. Sometimes when I read them, I feel like I can picture him on his travels, taking inspiration from the simplest of things, writing his verses even in discomfort, possibly hungry, cold, stuck in bad weather, probably tired.
And then I wonder how on earth I can claim any adversity at all.
At any rate, today I was reading some Matsuo Basho and I found this one:
snow on snow
this night in December
a full moon
—Matsuo Basho
I’m currently editing my book Winter Solstice for republishing so this little haiku caught my attention, especially when I read the backstory of it. Basho wrote it for two fellow poets who were arguing, hoping by pointing out the beauty of the moon’s glow on the snow, he could defuse the fight.
I don’t know if it worked for them, but it gave me something to think about. I wondered what it would be like to write a sonnet with the same idea. So I did.
For Basho By Michelle Garren-Flye
Why persist in impatience and strife? When yonder field full of starflowers reflects the moon’s light into our life, how can this world of war be ours?
Sit here beside me, give me your cares. Worries, bad habits, and visions begone! Along with all the stuff of your nightmares— the ones that sometimes linger on.
This world is full of beauty, you know: meadows turned into a galaxy of stars by nothing more than the moon’s glow concealing all of our cuts and scars
Take heart! Come with me and dance in soft grass among stars and planets.
It’s hard to remember sometimes that our world has been through a lot and survived. Sometimes the news makes it seem we are on the brink of all the disasters. Politicians make money off our fears, the media churns out new ones every day. But today I saw a Monarch on a bunch of pink lemonade lantana, and it made me happy.
Photo and poem copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye
I still remember the first day I actually identified as a poet. September 11, 2020. I had entered a local poetry contest and there was a reading. Still wearing a mask to keep the dreaded COVID-19 at bay, I attended with my then husband. The poem I read that night was prophetic, but the sticker the organization gave me to wear with my name badge was even more so.
It said, quite simply: “Poet”.
And when I put it on, I didn’t feel like an impostor.
I’ve read a lot of my poems in public since then. I’ve read other people’s poems in public, too. No matter what I do, I know I am a poet. Maybe we are all poets at heart, so maybe I’m not that special, but I have fully embraced being a poet.
Today is National Poets’ Day. It seems an appropriate day to share the news of my latest poetry book, Unwelcome Souvenirs. I’m very proud of this book. It has more than ninety poems in it, including many of the fortune cookie poems I wrote last April for National Poetry Month.
As a very important aside, my daughter also published her first poetry book this week. This was not planned. We finished them close to the same time, and when she told me hers was ready, I thought about how we used to get hiccups at the same time when she was a baby.
Just so you know I am not an impostor poet, I will share the last poem from the “Broken Things” portion of my book:
Just the Heart By Michelle Garren-Flye
just the heart that's all that's left after all the acid rain and all the cleansing pain washed everything else away
just the heart left on a simple pedestal i let the rest of it go (not without a fight though.) I'll plant it now, see what grows.
Copies of my daughter’s book next to mine on the shelf at my store. Photo and poem copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye
So, yesterday, when I might or might not have preferred to be watching anime, I mowed the lawn. My lawn hadn’t been mowed in about two weeks, and it had, in the meantime, been watered well by the rains of a tropical storm. It was thick, lush, quite tall, and inhabited by many crickets, spiders, moths, mosquitoes, and some very pretty green bugs with lacy wings.
It was an entire habitat.
Needless to say, in my little urban neighborhood, said habitat had to go. Not to mention that it also probably housed roaches, mice, and other pests that I’d prefer not to encounter when I take my dog out at night.
To alleviate my guilt, I imagined myself as an anime villain, mowing down everything in my path, laughing evilly as the innocent bugs tried to escape. And that got me writing this poem in my head. I originally thought it was a villanelle. Not sure what it ended up as, but I do like the rhyme scheme, and the evil tone that grows more seductive through the poem is a little chilling, even to me.
Call Me Destructor By Michelle Garren-Flye
Call me Destructor; watch me lay waste. I cannot hear your cry, but you will not escape.
Luxuries can’t make me poor; destruction is my only taste. My use of power I justify; just watch me lay waste.
I feel the rush in my core… Victims stuck in my mindscape— watch them flitter and fly! I laugh as they try to escape.
Never enough, I always want more. Your dreams I will reshape— raze it all, the only way to satisfy this desire I have to rape.
You want what you know is in store; your desires were never chaste. I know this you cannot deny. Are you sure you desire escape?
Photo and poem copyright 2024 Michelle Garren-Flye.
BREATHE: Michelle Garren-Flye 