Seasons Greetings

On The Blog

Muddling Through

This is a love letter to people who leave their blinds open at night.

I like to take walks through my neighborhood and peek inside your homes. Especially this time of year, as Christmas trees begin to pop up in windows and stair banisters are strung with twinkle lights. I am not trying to spy on you—mostly I am interested in what color your walls are painted, what kind of kitchen cabinets you have, I am always on the lookout for a better living room lamp, do you have a nice one that might serve as inspiration?—but every now and then I catch a glimpse. You on the couch, watching television. You at the counter, chopping onions. Your family sitting down to dinner, so much later than mine does. Was it a busy day at work? I tell myself stories about your lives, imagine you as characters in a piece of writing I’ve been slowly crafting in my mind. The woman seated in the round back chair by the window, book in one hand, a glass of wine on the end table beside her: she is a mother, small children finally in bed. Her shoulders ache, her neck is stiff, but this is bliss, seated here alone in the dim light of a reading lamp. I’ve got a glass of wine and a book and nobody needs me! she will text a friend and they will go back and forth for forty minutes, sharing stories of their days as she scrolls through Twitter and Instagram until she starts to grow tired and decides, wine finished, book unread, to head up to bed.

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Dear Santa

Over the weekend, my son and I spent some time reading his favorite book: the toy catalog that recently came in the mail. ‘Tis the season of want.

The first day it arrived he went through and circled in blue all the items that interest him. He drew a big red X through anything he thought looked boring or was meant for younger kids. He has since gone back and circled some of those items in red and informed me that I should buy those too so that he can share them with his younger cousins. A small measure of generosity among the excess.

“Will you get me these things?” he asks and when I tell him to make a list, he holds up the catalog and looks at me like I’m being intentionally dense. This is his list, plus everything he’s mentioned over the past year which ranges from “a real-life boomerang,” “one of those, like, remote control truck things that shoot actual lasers” (is this a thing? how did he come up with this?), to “little animals made out of glass.”

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A Not-At-All-Humble Brag

Sending a very special thank you to the editors of Literary Mama and Miniskirt Magazine for nominating my work for the Pushcart Prize.

My poems “Parenting Advice” (published in Literary Mama) and “Cardinals Mate for Life” (published in Miniskirt Magazine) are now up for consideration to be included in this year’s Pushcart Prize anthology. Fingers crossed they make it in!

Kid Stuff

It’s been a while since I’ve done any kid-lit writing apart from painfully slogging through the first draft of the middle grade novel I’m working on, but I recently had two winter poems published at The Dirigible Balloon. Check out First Snow and A Winter Walk.

As Long As We Got Each Other

Growing Pains: Microchap Volume 1, featuring my collection, As Long As We Got Each Other, is here! My author copies arrived this week and I am so excited to see this collection in print.

When I saw the initial call for microchapbook submissions on the theme of Growing Pains, the first thing that came to my mind were the lyrics to the theme song from the television show Growing Pains. This is an indication of not only how old I am, but of that song being the worst kind of earworm that takes up residence in your brain for over thirty years and pops up at a moment’s notice.

I decided it would be a fun challenge to write the collection with those lyrics as my starting point. I have woven one line of the lyrics into each piece in the collection, so that the song unfolds in order, highlighted throughout the collection in bold text. As Long As We Got Each Other is not about the television show, Growing Pains, or even about the theme song specifically. The stories and poems in this collection are about growing up, and the confusion and intensity of early intimacy and teenage friendships. There are pieces about grief, desire, heartache, and navigating new experiences. This is a collection about letting go, moving on, and discovering who you are, set to the tune of the Growing Pains theme.

If you'd like to purchase a copy, you can do so through ELJ Editions for $18. I also have a few extra copies that I am happy to offer up for a discounted price. You can email me at ctaylorwrites at gmail to work out the details.

For now, here is the title piece from As Long As We Got Each Other.