Blooming Fiascoes

What do you love most? Tell me all the things you’d miss. What new and beautiful thing will you do this year? What is your origin story? Introduce yourself. Tell us, tell us.

Blooming Fiascoes, my third collection of poems, arrived from Northwestern University Press in February 2021 – as the world was still reeling from a global pandemic and events, books parties, conferences and all the ways to share your work were at a sort of standstill. Still, there were ways to connect, to read, share and write together.

Months ago, I received 100 Blooming Fiascoes postcards and instantly thought of the possibilities. The extravagant joy of mail addressed to you. And wanted to send off words and energy and electricity out to all the people I love, and all the people I want to know even more. Each postcard would have a prompt or line from Blooming Fiascoes and an invitation. Write with me, write toward and away from each other, from and for all of us. Come join in this collective offering. As friends, former students and poets I so admire began to share their own poems, memories, stories – I started to see a conversation forming, a map of poems, of dialogue across the country. What is blooming? What is coming apart? What do we hold onto and what can be let go of? Hungry for connection, these poems speak to one another. They work in tandem – one engaging the next. All of them a kind of thread linking us together.

BLOOMING FIASCOES
FALL 2021 ASTER(IX) IN-RESIDENCY SERIES

THE ONE TIME I DIED AND WENT TO HEAVEN by Alondra Uribe
EXCERPT OF WHAT I LOVE MOST by Jessica Diaz
TELL ME ALL THE THINGS YOU’VE MISSED by Natalia Torres
ATLANTA by Danni Quintos
BOBA PEARL WITH A HEARTBEAT by Rachelle Cruz

Join us!

If you want a prompt, try one below:

This year…
In those early days…
Once, I too…
It’s not the first…
Allow me…
What we do…
Origin storied…
To the woman…
Tell me all the things you’d miss…

And if you want a postcard or letter with a prompt, you can send me your address here: http://www.ellenhagan.com/contact

Ellen Hagan

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her books include Blooming Fiascoes, Hemisphere, Crowned, Watch Us Rise (co-written with Renée Watson) and Reckless, Glorious, Girl. She has had poems and essays published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies: She Walks in Beauty, Southern Sin and Women of Resistance. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 2020 and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Ellen is the Director of the Poetry & Theatre Departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. She co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer's Retreat at Adelphi University.