Author: Narya Rose Deckard
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Announced as 2025 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship Award Winner
I am delighted to share that I was selected as the recipient of NC Poetry Society’s award winner for the Susan Laughter Meyers’s Poetry Fellowship. I am honored to be recognized in the name of such a beautiful poet’s legacy. Read about her here at Press 53’s site, where her books are also available for Read more
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Earth Songs and the Machines that Mediate Between
Lead vocalist of Wardruna Einar Selvik said at their show at Red Rocks Amphitheater last October that there used to be a song for everything: sowing seeds, picking herbs, brewing beer. The song connected action with self, and the living entities we were working with (e.g, seeds, herbs, grains in beer). How deep do we Read more
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Honoring Stories, Honoring Our Humanity: Thinking About Close Reading
Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and Read more
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Brave Enough to Admit We’re Lost: Finding Self to Find Community
In early 2025 I had the privilege of hearing Clint Bowman read from his new book of poems, If Lost, at Poetry Hickory, a monthly poetry reading with featured poet followed by an open mic. Bowman explained he organized his book as a sort of guide for someone lost, with three sections that act as Read more
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Earthed by Light: Response to Sylee Gore’s chapbook Maximum Summer
Despite the heat in Sylee Gore’s chapbook of poems Maximum Summer, the book holds a cold dark, the baby being fitted with clothes knitted while the speaker is on commute, always the breeze pushes leaves of the sycamore, blue light is a cool light, and the images in her poems only expose flashes of life Read more
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Have You Hugged Your Poem Today? (Who Are We Writing For?)
John O’Donohue says in Eternal Echoes: “Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how” (p. 186). When I originally wrote this quote down in my journal, I was spending time thinking about the value of understanding Read more
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When Our Forests Stop Breathing
A student in my college writing class this semester turned his essay exploring how wolves are essential to maintaining balance in ecosystems into a fairy tale. The prompt, as part of the class’s final portfolio, was to remix something written in the class from one format to another format, thus exploring how the message both Read more
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Assembling a Woman and Letting Go: Review of Maeve Fox’s “Letting Go of Me”
Maeve Fox’s poems show how through the act of “Letting Go,” we become. In her collection of poems Letting Go of Me, published in April 2025 by Redhawk Publications, Maeve Fox braids together past and present, and though the cover says written by both “John Fox” and “Maeve Fox,” a single voice of loving the Read more
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Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Revision as Receptivity for Depth and Change
Revision: “making a subsequent draft better than a previous one.” But what does “better” mean when I’m trying to ground myself in “writing as a way of being” or “writing for writing’s sake” and not writing with an end-goal, a linear, teleological purpose? How do I adopt a purposeless purposefulness? The more I have written Read more
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Howl Into Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard’s Wolfcraft
I’ve just sent out a press release! Here it is: Kick off the first day of Poetry Month with Narya Rose Deckard at her book launch! Her first collection of poetry Wolfcraft will debut locally at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory on April 1 at 6:15 PM. The event is free and open Read more