My earliest memory was of my near brush with death in my youth in Mexico.  I slipped into a local swimming pool and no one seemed to notice.  I did not know how to swim.  I was five, maybe six.  I remember sinking to the bottom.  In a panic I flailed my arms and legs.  I thought I was a goner.   Somehow I was able to walk from the bottom to the edge of the pool and I was able to climb or float to the top.  I was able to get my hands on the edge and pulled myself out of there.  I remember gasping for air.  It was years before I got near a swimming pool again.

What was your first acceptance/publication?

My first acceptance was for Mosaic, which was the name of the poetry journal at Mount San Antonio Community College in Walnut, CA.  I was a student and submitted a poem about my aunt’s funeral.  The piece was called “No Pictures Please.”  It might have been a rhyming poem.  I got $30.00 for it.

Print or electronic?

I prefer print journals to electronic journals.  But I have nothing against electronic journals.   Online journals have been good to me.  Still, there is nothing like the feel of a book.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to?

I don’t always listen to music when I write, but when I do, I listen to anything from rock to jazz, blues to rhythm and blues, or punk to alternative music.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal was born in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico and now lives in Los Angeles County. His first book of poetry, Raw Materials, was published by Pygmy Forest Press in 2004. Some of his poems are influenced by his work in the mental health field in Los Angeles, CA. His chapbooks have been published by Kendra Steiner Editions, Deadbeat Press and New Polish Beat. Alternating Current Press will publish his chapbook, Songs For Oblivion, in 2012.

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My first memory is of picking up my brother from the adoption agency.  He hide at my mothers feet in the front seat of our Buick. He cried from Newark, NJ to North Bergen, NJ. I was two years old and got a new brother (same age as me) for Christmas.  My mother adopted all four of her children.

What was your first acceptance/publication? Print or electronic?

My first accepted publication was with “The National Library of Poetry”  the pieces are called “Directions” and “Within/Without” this was in 1996. It was a printed anthology which I had to pay for it.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to?

I usually write alone and with no music.  Most of the time it is in the middle of the night when the rest of the house is sleeping, it has always been this way.  If I hear music as I write, my hand wants to put in the lyrics as I create, and that not good.

Ellen says: Captured Moments is my first collection of poetry I have had published by Unbound Content, it was a wonderful experience. It can be purchased: https://www.createspace.com/3741270

You can also find me:

With my aunt on a streetcar in Pittsburgh, Pa., attempting to tie my shoe laces. I was around four or five.

What was your first acceptance/publication?

A series of three magazines published by the same publisher out of Charleston, Ill. They were the American Poet, United Poets, and Prairie Poetry.

Print or electronic?  

They were print.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to?

Yes, I listen to jazz and classical. But not music with lyrics, which I find distracting when I’m working. Mozart, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Beethoven, Mahler, Totenfeier, Vivadi, Charlie Parker, etc. When I’m not working, I listen to all kinds of music, especially rock ‘n roll and folk.

Doug Draime’s most recent books in print are: Rock ‘n Roll Jizz (Propaganda Press) http://alt-current.com/pp/pp_item.html#rock_n_roll_jizz and Los Angeles Terminal: Poems 1971-1980 (Covert Press) covert.poetics@gmail.com. Also two online chaps: Speed of Light http://www.righthandpointing.com/draime/ and Stoned On A Poco Stick http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/100s/issue130chapbookcover.html. Awarded PEN grants in 1987 and 1991. Nominated for several Pushcart Prizes in last few years. He lives with his wife and family in Oregon.  Tune in to listen to Draime read his poetry every three months over at the New American Dream Radio Show. His previous readings and interviews are archived and future readings listed: http://theshow.newamericandream.info.  A forthcoming larger collection due out from Interior Noise Press in 2012. 

My earliest memory is my grandmother’s funeral when I was 4 years old.

What was your first acceptance/publication? 

My first publication was my ebook “To Your Health: Humanities Diagnosis“.  My first accepted publication through magazine was my poem “Don’t Disturb The Dead Bird” in the Railroad Poetry Project.

Print or electronic? 

I prefer print by far over electronic.  I like to be able to hold the book in my hand rather read it online.  It helps me focus. I also like the mobility of a book without a Kindle or any other ebook reader.  Print books just have a better feel.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to? 

I listen to music off and on when writing.  It depends what mood I’m in.  I usually listen to artists like A Silver Mt Zion, Explosions In The Sky, The Fall Of Troy, and Mewithoutyou.  Post rock bands and instrumental music in general I find much more helpful then band with lyrics though.  I find the lyrics distracting when I’m trying to write.

Jeremiah Walton is a 16 year old poet from New England.  He is author of “Nostorvia!” and “To Your Health: Humanities Diagnosis”.  He manages the website Nostrovia! Poetry where writers can submit in a free weekly contest and have their poetry published through the Guest Blog.

I’m really bad with time. I don’t know the difference between something that happened when I was twelve versus something that happened when I was sixteen. My memory is fractured and uncertain. But I can tell you what I believe my earliest memory to be. I remember learning to tie my shoe next to a hole in the front porch of the house I used to live in, in Graysville, Alabama. My family used to own a goat named Sandy that ate all the neighbor’s flowers. My sister and I used to ride down the hill in a red wagon, and once we crash-landed in a ditch. These memories became the inspiration for the poem, “Memory House.” (Only, using my poetic license, the poem ends with the metaphorical and patently untrue allusion to the death of my sister in the line, “my sister/ in the hole/ with flowers.”)

What was your first acceptance/publication? Print or electronic?

On a whim, I submitted a fifteen-line prose poem to Hayden’s Ferry Magazine, run by the University of Arizona at Tempe. I didn’t fill out the entry form, so the contest managers sent me a form to fill out. Then they informed me I had won third place in their nationwide student competition. The reward was publication in their print journal and a hundred dollars. Later, they informed me that a lack of space would not allow me to be published after all, and the hundred dollar check they sent me was made out to “Herbert,” not “Heather,” my given name or gender. I used the money to buy a copy of the Writer’s Market.

Do you write while listening to music? If so, what do you listen to? 

I find that most of the time, my creative process requires a silence that allows me to think. If I listen to music for inspiration, it’s usually a familiar song that elicits the emotion that is to be most prevalent in my writing that day, and I listen to it prior to writing, not during the actual act of writing. More so than music, daydreaming is my most powerful creative tool. It allows me to fully explore all facets of my feelings when I write poetry or more fully inhabit the characters that populate my fiction. Most of the time, I feel that writing is a solitary and silent process that forces me to abandon external influences and sounds so that I can fully retreat into my mind’s interior to wrangle out the good ideas.

H.K. Rainey received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetics from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work has previously appeared in Jacket Magazine, Sand Canyon Review, Cider Press Review, Corium Magazine, Full of Crow, the anthologies Word Trips: Poems from the First Coast (Hidden Owl Books, 2007) and Conversations at the Wartime Cafe: A Decade of War (2001-2011) (ed. Sean y Labrador Manzano, 2011), among others. She lives and writes in Hanceville, Alabama.

I was in first grade in Rapid City, SD learning from a speech pathologist how to pronounce my l’s. Another boy couldn’t pronounce his r’s. She asked me to pronounce r’s and asked him to pronounce l’s. Both of us pronounced the other’s letters flawlessly.  She said to each of us,”Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pronounce your own letters?” We eventually did.

What was your first acceptance/publication?

Not counting pubs that I was an editor of, it was Sahara, a little magazine out of Georgia, in 1975 or 1976.

Print or electronic?

Print.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to?

Yes, at times. Anything I like, from singer/songwriters to folk-rock to jazz. I love music. Anything but polka music and rap.

David Spicer has, over the years and in pursuit of the word, worked as a paper boy, dishwasher, bottle loader, record warehouser, carpet roll dragger, burger flopper, ditch digger, weather observer, furniture mover, Manpower flunky, gas pumper, bookseller, tutor, 11th & 12th grader babysitter, magazine and book editor and publisher, typesetter, proofreader, carney barker, chocolate twister, artist’s model, and last and certainly least, clinical trial subject for a laxative. He is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks plus five unpublished manuscripts of poems. His poems have appeared or will appear in The American Poetry Review, Alcatraz, Nitty Gritty, Ploughshares, Aura, Gargoyle, Hinchas de Poesia, Crack the Spine, Spudgun, and others.

I don’t know about first, but I was squeaking my crib as I learned I could move my arms and legs. My parents came upstairs, one of them saying in a deliberately worried voice, “Did you hear that noise? I hope it doesn’t wake Sheila!” I thought I had put one over on them, and laughed to my tiny little self.

What was your first acceptance/publication? 

Jim Haining at Salt Lick Press accepted two poems of mine. “The Mail” and “Solipsism.”

Print or electronic? 

Beautiful, typeset print, each issue a treasure with some fine visuals.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you  listen to?

Usually I write without music. When I do write to music, it is something I treasure, such as Pat Metheny, Joni Mitchell, Bernstein’s Mass, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, or any number of works.

Sheila E. Murphy’s ongoing collaborative poem with Douglas Barbour, titled Continuations 2 will appear this spring from the University of Alberta Press, which published the first volume in 2006. Murphy is the author of numerous books of poetry, and her individual book titled Americal Ghazals will appear this year from Otoliths Press in Qld, Australia. Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is a consultant and advisor to organizations and individual leaders, a researcher, a visual artist, college teacher, and poet. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy

So check out works by Howie Good, Lyn Lifshin, Aleathia Drehmer and even me.

Being chased by a German shepherd and crashing head-first into a wrought-iron fence in my fear and desperation to escape.

What was your first acceptance/publication?

St. Andrews Review.

Print or electronic? 

Print.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to?

I do listen to music while I write — classical.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

Earliest memory is being about 3 or 4 and waking up in the night with something’s hands playing with my toes at the end of the bed and me screaming into the blackness. My dad later told me it was him cutting my toenails, but I never believed him coz why cut a kid’s nails in the dark? And why didn’t I see him when i woke up? Plus he was always drunk and passed out early after work.

What was your first acceptance/publication? 

First acceptance was the London magazine Ambit back in 2008. I still got the slip. They paid me £75. It was 2 short stories.

Print or electronic?

I’ll take anything I can get, but I prefer print, just coz i can touch it and smell it, and bury with my bloated corpse.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, what do you listen to? 

Not often, but if i do it’s usually blues like Lightnin Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf, The Doors, White Stipes, Rolling Stones…

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