This month during the Slice of Life Challenge, I’m featuring some of my favorite poetry books by living poets and writing Cento poetry each day using the existing lines from poems in each collection to form a new poem. Miranda Cowley Heller rose to writing fame as author of The Paper Palace, a novel selected by Reese Witherspoon for her book club. Turns out, she’s an amazing poet as well!
You can read more about Miranda Cowley Heller here and here .
Family Secrets
Inside the case were all the photos
Alone at the kitchen table, I still
dig myself out of the sink
and my children cry blood tears for me.
From poems in this order: Salvage; The Taste of Pennies; Half-Life; and The Earth is Flat
A sneak peek of the first ten days of living poets I’m celebrating this month
We are at Day 6 – – almost a week into the Slice of Life Challenge for 2026, which runs all of March. This month, I’m celebrating a different living poet each day by using their collections to create a Cento poem; I take existing lines and weave them into a new “original” poem by mixing them in new ways. I first learned of Marcela Sulak through The Stafford Challenge last year, and today I’m using The Fault to create a Cento poem.
During the month of March, as part of the Slice of Life Challenge and the Stafford Challenge, I’m writing Cento poems all month by taking the lines of poetry from living poets and weaving them into a new poem. Today, I’m celebrating Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet who served as our 19th US Poet Laureate and Mississippi Poet Laureate.
You can read more about Natasha Trethewey at her website and in an interview here and here.
What Happened Next
In 1959, my mother is boarding a train
From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down
The lines of my young father’s face deepen
what’s left is footage: the hours before
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
Taken from: The Southern Crescent; Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi; Southern Gothic; Providence; Pastoral.
I’ve also used her poetry in the past to inspire other forms, such as Golden Shovels, which use a line vertically to become the beginning or ending words of the lines in the poem. You can see an example of a Golden Shovel here. One of the things I love most about the version of Native Guard that I have is that it came with a CD of Natasha Trethewey reading the poems. And yes, my RAV4 is a 2018, old enough to still have ………..(drumroll please)………a CD player!
A Sneak Peek of the first ten days of the living poets I’m celebrating this month
It’s Day 5 of the Slice of Life Challenge at Twowritingteachers.org, and as I move through the month of March celebrating living poets, I think back to the summer that Penny Kittle invited readers to engage with You are No Longer in Trouble during the Book Love Summer Reading Club. I was mesmerized by the prose poems that Nicole Stellon O’Donnell wrote as she told of her life growing up a Principal’s kid and later becoming a teacher herself. This book is a treasure, and one in which I believe we can all see ourselves at some point of our lives. For me, it’s the poem Marriage, about second graders getting married in “a rash of weddings” at recess with flowers pressed into aluminum foil bouquets. Sheer treasure!
I’ve used this collection to write a Cento by taking lines of her existing poetry and rearranging them into a new poem.
Tips for Not Sagging
Even the waitress at the post-funeral reception noticed
nothing about me sags.
Bag sagging between her hands,
it’s in the steps, in the motion of go, in the bent knees, the swing of an arm.
Never forget that.
Taken from these poems, in this order: Excuses for the Pilgrimage; A Teacher Playing a Movie Star Playing a Teacher; At Least Name What it Is; No One Takes Attendance at Commencement; What Not to Say to Your Students at the Juvenile Detention Center.
This month’s first ten days of Living Poets: A Sneak Peek of what is to come
It’s the 4th day of the 19th Annual Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers’ website, and I love starting my day with posts shared by writers across the globe who offer a glimpse into their daily lives. This month, I’m featuring a living poet each day and creating a Cento poem from the poems in their collections. You can read more about Cento poetry here. Today, I’m featuring Sandra Cisneros as an author I have long admired for her short stories. She’s also a poet! You can read more about Sandra Cisneros at her website. Here writing themes offer a glimpse of her cultural heritage. Im using Woman Without Shame to inspire a cento.
I’m adding an additional step-by-step photo process to my post today, since a couple of readers reached out wanting to know more about my process for writing Cento poems – and teaching students to write them. I’ll share in photos why even the most reluctant writer in your class might catch a case of poetry fever – without ever lifting a pencil.
Start with a favorite poetry book – or a stack of them.. Today, I used this one.
Next, gather some blank tongue depressors and a variety of Sharpie markers.
At this point, it’s not too late to turn back. This kind of poetry is highly contagious, and once it settles into your soul, you can’t escape.
But now that you have come this far, begin choosing favorite or random lines of poetry and writing the line on one side of the tongue depressor and the title of the poem and the poet’s name on the other.
Once you have a bank of lines, arrange them and rearrange them until you find the sweet spot of the poem the way you like it. Moving the sticks around, you’ll see how just one move changes everything – like a game of chess. But once you have it, you’ll know. At that point, add a title. In the illustration above, I titled mine “Security Deposit.”
Take a photo of the lines, and then – – very important – – flip them in order from top to bottom so that the poet is credited and the line order is preserved by poem title. Take a photo of the back, too, emphasizing to students that this credits the original poet.
If you don’t have tongue depressors, you can use strips of paper or cardstock. Or just write it out, like this:
Security Deposit
It takes growing older
To prove love is ever
wanting in
For Rent.
My Cento is taken from lines in these poems, in this order: Back Then or Even Now; Te A-; Note, La Casa Mag de lena, Lamy, New Mex; Sky Without a Hat.
Once the contagion has set in, you’ll soon have baskets and baskets of poetry lines. You may even decide to put magnets on the backs of them so students can use cookie sheets or magnetic boards as pop-up poetry stations. You might even find that you create collections to organize by theme of units or poets of a particular era. The possibilities are endless. Don’t be surprised if students themselves start checking out poetry books and asking to add lines to the bank of sticks. You may want to keep a healthy stock of supplies – because this will grow and grow and grow until you have a Poetry Wonderland of lines growing like kudzu vines!
Students will beg you to let them write poetry, and you can create a community Padlet for them to upload their poems by scanning a QR code to upload pictures of their poems in sticks.
They will do this because they are now poets who can’t wait to share their creations.
A sneak peek of the poets featured the first ten days of March
The third day of the 19th Annual Slice of Life Challenge is well underway at Two Writing Teachers’ website, and I invite you to visit and read the posts shared by writers across the globe, who give us a glimpse into their daily lives. This month, I’m featuring a living poet each day and creating a Cento poem from the poems in their collections. You can read more about Cento poetry here.
A few years ago, Fran Haley of North Carolina (blog: Lit Bits and Pieces) sent me a copy of The Language of the Birds by Amy Nemecek one spring when we were both participating in The Great Backyard Bird Count. I’m thanking Fran for this gift of poetry, and I’m celebrating Amy Nemecek today!
Amy Nemecek is a violinist and poet who lives in Michigan, and you can read more about her on this link that features a few other poets as well (scroll down on the post to read about Amy). Here is an additional link about Amy.
Choosing Tunes
Just when I think it’s over
I feed the jukebox quarters
As you slow dance around me
Lulled by the rhythm of pewter waves
I join you in its convex solitude
reminding you, reminding myself
our imperfect submission affords no rest.
My Cento lines are taken from these poems, in order: Larch Song;Acedia; Light Fantastic; Back to School;Companion; Beloved; and Vigil.
A sneak peek of the living poets featured the first ten days of March
Day 2 of the Slice of Life Challenge has me feeling energized with all of the fabulous writing that bloggers are sharing at Two Writing Teachers for the 2026 Slice of Life Challenge, where writers share daily snapshots of meaningful moments of their lives. You can check it out here.
My theme for this month was inspired by a friend who recently sent me a book she’d read (The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali). Thanks, Glenda Funk! Glenda said that she passes most of her books on, but she keeps poetry. It got me thinking about the living poets who are part of The Stafford Challenge and other writing groups like Poetry Friday. Perhaps I could expand my own collection of living poets – and that became a mission.
And so I set out to take a hard look at a diverse range of living poets. I discovered that no matter who we are – male, female, of all ethnicities and heritages, of urban or rural settings, of all religions and ages and places in the world – we all need poetry. Especially now. Especially in these times. Some of us read it, some of us write it, and many of us read and write it.
I decided to feature a living poet each day, celebrating their work and using their poems to create Cento poetry by taking lines of their existing poems and weaving together a whole new poem. You can read more about Cento here.
Today, I celebrate Brian Rohr, author of Shaken To My Bones: A Poetic Midrash on the Torah.
Brian Rohr started The Stafford Challenge, now in its third year of inviting poets to come together and to write a poem every day for one year. You can read more about Brian at his website. I’ve taken his collection of poems and formed a Cento poem, and I’ve listed the names of the poems I used, in order, beneath the poem.
When God Speaks
A star shoots across the sky.
Blue and red birds appear in my birch tree.
A bird with a blue head and blue wings flies past my window.
There are ways God speaks to me.
We can see the breath.
Taken from: Before; My Longing; Outside it is Raining; I am Joseph; In the Cool Air of the Morning Mist.
The first ten days of March will feature these poets – this is a sneak peek photo!
This month’s Slices of Life are dedicated to the love of poetry. Each day of March, I’ll be celebrating a living poet by creating a Cento poem from the lines of their poetry, along with links to more information about each poet as three of my writing circles intersect this month: The Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers, Open Write with EthicalELA, and The Stafford Challenge.
I’m kicking off the celebration with Sophie Diener, who wrote Someone Somewhere Maybe. She’s a poet who teaches and resides in Ohio, and she started writing in journals from the age of five or six. She’s the friend so many of us would have had in grade school and kept for life. She keeps a strong social media presence on Tik Tok and Instagram. You can follow her on Instagram:Â @sophiediener and on Tiktok:Â @sophiediener.
You can read more by and about Sophie here and here.
Cento poems feature lines of existing poetry that are put together in new ways to create a whole new poem, a lot like a quilt. Or Frankenstein. Or one of those photography montages where all the photos are put together to look like Abraham Lincoln or something. As I create a Cento from each collection of poetry this month, I’ll add the titles of each poem in line order beneath the poem. If you’ve never written a Cento, you may wish to challenge yourself to try this form this month and see how fun it is to write! Here is a Cento I’ve created from several of the poems in Sophie Diener’s book Someone Somewhere Maybe:
Becoming
Things take time to fall into place
in this precious part of your life.
There are parts of you that fade with time
But oh, how beautiful.
Recognize how far you’ve come.
Lines taken from these poems, in this order: Have Hope; Don’t be a Stranger; Blue; A Heart with Legs; You are Safe.
For anyone in the Thomaston/Newnan/Zebulon areas of Georgia, please come out and join the Silent Book Club Flint River in person if you are free on the dates listed on the flyer below. If you are not local, please read with us wherever you are in the world and let us know you did! Set aside an hour of time to read, then send a quick snapshot of you and your book to the Facebook page where our group news happens.
I’m part of the team trying to build this book club so that we have both an in-person and virtual following. We love to see people and their books!
Some Tuesdays I write about a tiny slice of life. A moment. Today, it’s going to have to be the whole pie. You see, I’ve been on a book adventure, and I want to share it with you.
When you fall head over heels in love with a book, its setting, and all the characters, you can’t just shake loose of the mind and heart embrace and move on with life. You want to live there in the pages, remain with the people, and mourn the ending of the page-turning joy that held you tight right through the last sentence. You slowed down because you didn’t want it to end, but you couldn’t stop that train.
When all you want to do is linger, you can’t accept that it’s over. The End. Done.
I’ve told all my friends about Theo of Golden by Allen Levi and its impact. It restores our hope in humanity and leaves us wanting to be more like Theo.
When fellow blogger Sally Donnelly watched Katie Couric interview Allen Levi, she sent me the link. A huge shout out to Sally for doing this ~ I was meeting with my own book club that evening and could not watch live.
When my sister-in-law Bethany finished the book, she was eager to see the coffee shop that inspired the book. We planned the one-hour drive over to Columbus, Georgia and invited our husbands along for the fun. Turns out, there is also the bike shop and the book store and the fountain and so many benches and the Riverwalk and even a character. But we didn’t know about the inspired character until our visit.
The Chalice in Golden is the fictional version of Fountain City Coffee Company, which sits on Broadway, a downtown street two blocks east of the Chattahoochee River that divides Georgia and Alabama. This is where we started our adventure on a rainy Sunday. We ordered coffee and muffins and sat at a table admiring the portraits on the wall – wondering about the stories of each face.
The man in the left corner above, wearing khakis, offered to take the photo below of our group when he saw us discussing the photos and referencing the book. Locals were extra kind and seemed to understand our need to experience this place.
We asked about Fedder Fountain, and one of the baristas explained that Columbus is known as “the fountain city” because there are fountains everywhere. We discovered this as we walked, but as we later discovered in the bookstore, all of the significant places we wanted to see were wrapped tightly within a block or so, and the photo below is probably the inspiration for Fedder Fountain. We believe that they turn the fountain off for the winter months to prevent freezing.
We saw art everywhere, but here is what we believe to be a feather (or a dragonfly wing), below. It resembles the cover of the book even in its gold and beige tones.
Next, we strolled down to the Riverwalk. The bricks to the left in the picture below form a walkway that extends a good way, and this is where Ellen and Theo would have taken their bike ride along the river. You can see the bridge in the photo, too – this takes you to Phenix City, Alabama on the other side, and there is a bike shop called Brickyard Bike (RiverRides in the book) where Ellen arranged the bike ride. Along the banks would be the place where she showed him the birds’ nest. One of my favorite parts of the book is when she takes out the Student Driver tag and puts it on the back of his borrowed Noble Invention after giving him these instructions: “Don’t bring anything with you. I want you to be able to keep both hands on the handlebars and your eyes on the trail. The last thing I need is a casualty. I’ll bring some water for us in my basket.”
Next, we found the bookstore. JudyBug’s Books was exactly as I had pictured The Verbivore from the descriptions in the book. The man behind the counter was as friendly as they come. We asked if he was the inspiration for Tony, and he grinned a knowing grin, tapping his chest. “I’m Tommy,” he smiled, introducing himself while stressing his similar name.
I have never met a bookseller I didn’t like, but I genuinely took interest in Tommy. He talked with us and told us about the town, even pausing to explain how before Covid, men would gather outside and talk (the Penny Loafers). I could tell that this man was happy and unhurried, peaceful and well-read. I asked him the title of the last great book he’d read. He ambled over to the display, kind of scratching his chin, and recommended Big Fish as the one he recommends to everyone. He explained that while he isn’t big on magical realism, he thinks this book is the best in its genre. Of course, when Tommy from JudyBugs or Tony from the Verbivore recommends a book, I’m buying it as I envision him drinking port with Theo from that bottle that told the story of a life.
I’d overheard a woman speaking with my sister in law as I was paying. She said she’d overheard us talking about Theo of Golden, which her book club was reading this month, and wondered if we’d read it. “Oh yes,” Bethany explained……and I watched the woman’s face light up as they talked after Bethany asked her if she realized she was standing in the Verbivore.
Tommy at JudyBug’s Books
Before leaving town, we drove across the bridge to Phenix City to see Brickyard Bike Company, which sits just half a block away from the river. It was closed, but we imagined Ellen giving biking advice to Theo before setting off down the Riverwalk.
A quick video of The Riverwalk in Columbus, Georgia
The photo below I have intentionally saved for last to leave those who have read the book with one last photo gift ~ Theo’s balcony.
if you know, you know
the significance of that
balcony upstairs……
I nearly cried when I saw it: there, directly across the street from the coffee shop, is a balcony with the most exquisite railing.
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers at Slice of Life
Common Threads 