Guest Author This Week at Best American Poetry

When I was asked to write five guest posts for the good people at Best American Poetry, I decided to go a little further outside my comfort zone than I'm used to. Instead of writing about my own poetry or the subjects I so often study, I composed five brief essays on my experience as a poet who uses meditation to survive the process, the craft, the professional creative writing field.

Please check out those essays here. I welcome your comments! Monday's post set up my personal introduction to meditation; Tuesday's elaborated on the value of compassion and nonviolence; today's is all about identifying "success" in poetry; tomorrow's will discuss mindfulness, and Friday's final post will bring you through the physical practice of walking meditation.

Meditating has not only been the key to my keeping hold of some perspective in this crazy profession, it's also been the reason I can sleep at night, survive Tom's deployments, negotiate anxiety and constant worry and depression. Meditation is available for all types of people, all religions, all backgrounds. We are all broken and beautiful and capable of deep awareness.

Enjoy, and thank you, Stacey Harwood, for the invitation to write for BAP!