Do you love journals and pens? Are you a particular-type-of-pencil snob? Are you drawn to notepads, Post-It Notes, notecards, and writing tablets of all shapes and sizes? If you said yes to any of these questions and you’ve ever had a secret wish to write poetry but aren’t sure how to start, I might can help.
I want to provide a link to a special book that is a completely free download herein digital form or a cost-of-printing book form here. Each chapter is filled with poems that explain the type of poetry, a prompt to get you started, instructions, and a mentor poem to show a sample by another poet for inspiration.
If you’re looking to set a goal of writing, this book can launch your new healthy habit!
My cousin Elizabeth, center, with us and her parents – my Aunt Ann and Uncle Tom
As far back as I can remember growing up, my dad’s only sister, Ann, has been an active part of my life. She married Tom Downing before I turned one, and they have been there through it all ~ birthdays, holidays, weddings, graduations, and funerals. Aunt Ann can shop for me better than I can shop for myself. She has an eye for putting together an outfit, and she has done this for me and for my grandchildren on several occasions. When my mother died, sisterless herself, she’d phoned Ann with a request before she left this earth.
“Be there for Kim when I’m gone,” she’d asked of my aunt. “She’s going to need you. You know why.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out why I would be spending hours each week on the phone with her. She was the only one who could help me navigate my dad, her brother, who didn’t particularly care for strong women. He was all for women in leadership roles – until they tried to lead him anywhere, and trying to help my dad in his later years would take strength and something I lack when my patience runs out: tact. And so Aunt Ann, always a strong Southern woman to the core and dripping in class, carries the torch as the voice of wisdom whenever I need to talk. She helped me through those final years with Dad, who did not know how to do life without my mother and swore off help from anyone until the bitter end. I could not have survived without my Aunt Ann to lean on.
When my cousin Elizabeth called to invite us to Uncle Tom’s 90th birthday this past Saturday, my husband and I made the drive to their home in Ashford-Dunwoody in Brookhaven, just north of Atlanta, to be part of the festivities. We were blessed to be part of that day, sharing in the memories and the moments of belonging as family. In the midst of the holiday season, with this being the first Christmas without Dad after losing him in June, these times seem to carry more weight. As I walked through their house, each room brought back such memories of all the years there for various events, and I felt the shadow of my childhood self playing games on Thanksgiving Day in the basement while the men watched football and the women cooked. The moments of today carry far more layers of meaning as I return to their home, the place of old pictures and relatives long gone now. Ann and I stood on her front porch for a few moments alone together, remembering the space where we’d all stood smiling as Uncle Tom brought his camera for photos, the space now every bit as sacred as the circle at the Grand Ole Opry, preserved through the years and taken into the newer building just to keep the same floor where the stars have all stood.
We wish Tom a very happy birthday, and cheers to the years ahead and all the years behind along the journey that brought us to now.
it all matters more
today than ever before
these crossroads of life
Aunt Ann’s porch of family pictures through the years
Mo Daley of Illinois introduced the X Marks the Spot poem in one of our monthly Open Writes through Ethicalela.com. To write one, find any page of print and make an X from corner to corner or across any part, then list the words the X touches. Using one, a couple, a few, some, most, or all of those words, write a poem. I chose a recent essay by humorist David Sedaris, “And Your Little Dog, Too,” for my X and used chained haiku for the form.
Here are the words I listed:
unconscious hole bent sells past shout seemingly walking foot mountain addicted leg snarling registered recreational pushed realized obnoxiously illicit downtown
My hero of Golden Shovel writing is Stacey Joy of Los Angeles, California. She’s an LA Teacher of the Year, and I’m proud to call her a writing circle friend. Stacey is a true inspiration, and we write together three days a month as part of the Ethicalela Open Write hosted by Sarah Donovan. To write a Golden Shovel, take a sentence, phrase, or even a book title and write it vertically. These can be the words that start each line or that finish each line. And if you really want a brain workout, try a double or triple shovel by writing three sets of words vertically and spreading them out to try to make them fit.
I’m not ambitious enough to try a double or triple shovel today, but here is a Golden Shovel using the lines of my current book title my book club will read in January, Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson, as the starting lines in a poem. As part of the Stafford Challenge with Brian Rohr this year, I’m writing a poem every day using different forms.
Vertigo
Not just dizziness and spinning, but
Quite a bit more ~ nausea, stumbling
Dead to the world today
Yet twice as alive tomorrow
Click Here to go to a video on writing a Golden Shovel poem.
Come sit right here by me if you’re a reader. Settle in, pour a cup of coffee, and let’s have a book chat. I want to hear what stories have kept you reading this year, and how your reading has inspired new adventures.
I’ll go first. Right now, I’m reading Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson, which will be the January 2026 pick for our Kindred Spirits book club. It has me on the edge of my seat at every new twist and turn. I especially like that the setting is taking me back to our trip to Woodstock, Vermont in November of 2024, where we had one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had in my life, complete with Vermont maple syrup that was made from the trees on the property where we were staying. A friend and member of the Kindred Spirits book club recommended Woodstock as a stop on our trip after NCTE last year, and we used her exact trip itinerary from a trip she’d taken with her daughter in planning our own. While my husband and I were in Woodstock, we took some time to go exploring a few back roads while we were there, and I have some of the setting assigned to places we saw, such as the famous bridge. It’s hard to imagine that a crime like the one in this book could happen there, but where there are humans, there will be crime. This book inspired me to wrap up in a blanket I bought from the Vermont Flannel Company while I was there and to pull up the photos from that amazing trip and add them to the new digital photo frame my daughter sent us for Christmas. Oh, to go back there!
The Kindred Spirits dive into exciting fiction, and this group tends to gravitate toward thrillers. Once we’ve finished reading a book, we plan some sort of adventure to go along with what we have read so that we allow our reading to inspire new discoveries. You can see our reading choices and adventures from 2025 here. We’ll be meeting December 19 to put the first six months of our 2026 list together. I’d like to ask for your favorite book recommendations. Please help us out ~ which books have you read recently that you savored, and what made you fall in love with them? Also, have you ever been part of a reading retreat where everyone reads a few books and then drives an hour or two to a mountain lodge for a weekend to talk about those books, read more books, sit by the fire, eat delicious food, visit a spa, and shop in the stores on the town square? We’ve heard of those retreats and are thinking of trying one sometime this year, so we’re all ears for your most exciting book experiences as we plan a few slices of life.
A street scene of Woodstock, Vermont
My husband sits by the fire of the Woodstock Inn as we wait to eat dinner
My second favorite shop in Woodstock, where I bought our favorite blanket (the bookstore was my favorite)
My daughter sent a text to alert me about a package to arrive shortly as she tracked its movements. She asked me to call when we opened it so that she could give us a few pointers about it (I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more my children have started offering pointers on how to work things).
As we FaceTimed, she watched our excitement when we realized she’d sent us a digital photo frame.
How wonderful! I exclaimed, already thinking of all the photos I would upload and wondering if I would be able to figure it out. It would be nice to see snapshots from our recent week in the Great Smoky Mountains. When I’ve wanted to see those photos, I’ve had to scroll to them on the camera and search – – but a digital frame would keep them rolling and keep us thinking of the family members who mean so much to us!
That’s not just any digital frame, Mom, she explained. That’s a Cozyla interactive frame. If you invite all your kids to upload photos, we can send you pictures anytime and you can see them pop up in real time. You’ll hear a Boo…Boop and it’ll be a notification alerting you that we’re sending you new pictures.
I set it up while she was on FaceTime with me and already have nearly 200 photos in the album. I’m going strong, and I didn’t need as many pointers as she (or I) thought I might. I can’t wait to get my first notification that a new photo has popped up. We’ll be on the lookout for new smiling faces of our grandchildren – – which is like a new gift every day, especially during the holidays with all their excitement. It’s even more so since with four children in four different states, we don’t get to be together in person nearly as often as we’d like.
Common Threads 