Awards Ceremony!

Next Wednesday, May 24, 2023, at 7:00pm, the Bellingham Cruise Terminal (355 Harris Avenue in Fairhaven) will again come to life with the sound of poetry. The Awards Ceremony for the 2023 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest is free and open to the public. The evening will be hosted by everyone’s favorite emcee, Kevin Murphy, with comments from the judges, Caitlin Scarano and Leslie Wharton, and the year’s award-winning poems read by their poets. Please come celebrate community poetry at this heartwarming event.

On Spring Gratitude

This is a guest post by Caitlin Scarano.

This morning I am thinking about spring. It is sunny again after seven days of rain. There are robins in my yard and my partner planted kale and spinach starts in the garden boxes. The grass is too tall but too wet to cut, a convenient excuse that probably won’t last much longer.

I recognize the impulse to clean, organize, and restructure my space and life that always reemerges around this time a year. I also recognize the impulse to start booking travel plans and adventures for the summer. At this point in my life, I’m torn between taking time to stay and dwell in my current life in Bellingham or taking the opportunity to go and explore our strange, wide country. I think this is a new and specific kind of privilege, to have finally put down roots somewhere long enough that I want to stay. This is the longest I’ve lived in one region since I was a teenager. I’ve been in Bellingham since September of 2021 but moved to western Washington in the summer of 2017. That was about a year after I got sober, another topic that has been on my mind lately.

These topics — the return of spring, opportunities to travel, and my seventh year sober — intersect around a clear idea or theme I’d like to hold on to: gratitude. I keep an index card taped above my writing desk that reads: Gratitude always. I often forget it is there, as we tend to do with things that are closest to us, and often forget to feel gratitude. But it is the prevailing emotion of my life at age thirty-five. All the twists and turns, traumas and opportunities, that led me to being the person I am now, living in this little house with these two dogs, having this yard and this partner and this specific community of friends, activities, and writers, these trails to run, etc.

It is hard to name the specific feeling of anticipation for that which you already have and are also growing; the feeling of looking forward to the home and community you’re making and the adventure that comes with knowing and loving a place intimately. It calls to mind this quote from adrienne maree brown from her novel Grievers, an apt thought to end on: “Abundance comes through meaningful work, the opportunity to be somebody who means something to other somebodies.”

Ed. note: You can hear Caitlin Scarano, live and in person, tonight, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 6:00pm, at Village Books in Fairhaven, where she will be joined by Jane Wong and Jessica Gigot.

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Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MA from Bowling Green State University. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, Carve, and Colorado Review. Caitlin served as a judge for the 2023 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest.

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crabapple blossoms photo by J.I. Kleinberg
author photo

tonight in Bellingham!

Tonight, Friday, February 24, 2023, at 8:00pm Pacific, come on down to Honey Moon Mead & Cider in Bellingham and join Jory Mickelson, Caitlin Scarano, and Jessica Gigot for a poetry reading, with music by Louis Ledford.

Honey Moon has a busy calendar. Have a look.

Meet the judges

The Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest has just announced that Caitlin Scarano and Leslie Wharton will be the judges for this year’s Contest, which opens for submissions March 1, 2023.

Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full-length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and recently won a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com
 
 

Leslie Wharton understands poetry holds the power to change the course of events. As a tender-hearted judge, she’ll be drawn to poems that move her emotionally. Along with her partner’s pottery and welded art, her books, cards, and poetry are displayed in a shipping container turned tiny gallery, Wharton Studio Works. Leslie published She Votes in 2022 and is co-author of Phoenix Rising: Stories of Remarkable Women Walking Through Fire. Her work as a caregiver for the elderly inspires her writing.