Karen Douglass, Author

Karen Douglass, Author: Prose & Poetry

Citizen Writer

Given all the static this past weekend, public and personal, I chose not to post on Saturday as I usually do. But that doesn’t mean my brain hasn’t been churning. It has, and here’s the big idea, not new, but worth repeating: writers have a unique opportunity to engage in the public debate. We can…

January 23, 2017
Writers Unite

Tomorrow, January 15, 2017, an important event happens at Lighthouse Writers, 1515 Race Street in Denver: Writers Resist: Words of the West. The headline on the flyer reads “On Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday, Writers Across the World Will Gather to Speak, Read, and Re-Claim our Democratic Ideals.” The Lighthouse gathering is free and open…

January 14, 2017
Beginners/Middlers/Enders

This week, emptying the box in which I had stashed a year’s worth of journals, I found that all too many had blank pages at the back because I rushed to start a new one before I finished the old. I love a new journal, a new pen, a new car. (Though in truth I have kept a…

January 7, 2017
What’s the Use of Poetry?

In W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” we find the line “For poetry makes nothing happen …” but we also find this: “Let the healing fountain start,/ In the prison of his days/ Teach the free man how to praise.” Assuming that the free man might be man or woman, we need…

December 31, 2016
Seasonal Sadness

Whether we call it seasonal affective disorder or the winter blahs, we know that this dark time of the year can suggest never again being warm and free of gloom. So for millennia we have created festivals of light–candles, holiday decorations, elves in bright red suits, and a reindeer whose nose is a beacon in the fog.…

December 24, 2016