graduation announcement

Sherri is pleased to announce her graduation from Pacific University with a Master of Fine Arts in Writing.

Celebrate accordingly.

new craft essay: add real stuff

My craft essay, "Add Real Stuff to Your Fiction," is included in the first Forest Avenue Press' Seven Questions Series collection edited by Laura Stanfill, Brave On the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life. The book is a collection of interviews and flash essays by and about Northwest authors, why and how they write.

"Writing can be a lonely thing to love," writes Stanfill. "And yet we all commit the same brave act—confronting the blank page every day. No matter what the cost, no matter what the outcome, we set our other obligations aside to write."

I am one of those writers. Once I told my mentors Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose (from the Pinewood Table), "I quit every day. And then, every day, I start again."

I am honored to be included in Brave on the Page alongside the other 41 Northwest writers, some of them my dear friends. It is, as Stanfill says, "something to celebrate."

 - sherri

birthmother

I have gone into the earth
brown
mud to its bones

below the winter rains
heart slow
skin cold
to sleep.


I have gone into the sky

ligament and feather
pulse pushing
body-shaped space
in the wind
spinning.


Into the wake of rivers

rusty green
runoff
weeping snowmelt
milfoil filling the
gap of fish.


No use.


I come here every year

marker
memory
sorrow
grieving

old remorse
familiar
as the rains 

release
release
release


~ sherri

"Once upon a time

when women were birds
there was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world through joy."

~Terry Tempest Williams