Elisavietta RitchieElisavietta Ritchie
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new notes from elisavietta

Stay Tuned! News Forthcoming!

As the year begins to gather momentum, take note of these now and future publications and events.

Also something being organized for a half-dozen poets from Southern Maryland to read in White Plains outside Baltimore; am considering an anthology of the bunch of us.

Fred Wolven of ANN ARBOR REVIEW accepted a bunch of poems: View online

Ginosko Literary Review accepted story "The Crawl Space" for issue 22 for Midwinter 2018-2019

New pieces under consideration

LUNATIC MOONS: INSOMNIA CANTATAS is in production at Shelden Studios and should be published this spring.

Coming in April 2019:

Visions of Verses, April 10 - May 5th

Reception April 13 from 5-8pm at calvART Gallery

A new anthology of poems by some dozen poets writing on some dozen paintings at calvART Gallery in Prince Frederick; Michael Glaser is masterminding this event. Stay tuned for updates.

April 3, 2019 6:30 pm
READING AT CROFTON LIBRARY

Crofton Community Library 1681 Riedel Rd Crofton, MD 21114

Reading with Karla Christopher-Waid, the former Poet Laureate of YORK PA. Susan Sonde is organizing this.

 

Saturday December 15 book party at Southern Library:

A rainy windy afternoon so few came to library but six of my closest friends and it was a fine afternoon!

Monday evening December 3 at Twin Beaches (Chesapeake and North Beach):

To my surprise I was expected to hog the limelight for what turned out to be a two-hour reading/christening of my new THE SCOTCH RUNNER: STORIES; every seat taken by new and old friends. Joan Kilmon is the librarian at Twin Beaches and turned my reading into a festive occasion.

September 2018

My third fiction collection THE SCOTCH RUNNER: STORIES is out from Poets Choice Publishing.

The Scotch Runner

Saturday March 3, 2018

lisa's book table

Book fair, College Park, MD
Rocky Jones will share my table to display his book MY DEMO.

I will feature my newest publications:

harbingers

 

Reflections

Reflections: A Poet's Gallery, poems on paintings

The latest collection of poems in Elisavietta Ritchie's long and distinguished career, a master poet reflecting on visual masterpieces. "Long may the dance continue for Lisa Ritchie and all her devoted followers who love how poetry can buoy the human spirit in the hands of such a fierce intelligence and curiosity." - Richard Harteis, Poets' Choice Publishing.


February 12, 2018

Dear Gang,

With a broken shoulder amid a big move, my schedule and my writing and communiques have also broken into pieces, so instead of forwarding a bunch of artcles etc to jumpstart your memories real and fictional, I merely suggest you come up with a piece that may or may not be true --

A few ego-trips also — spurred me to keep on (such as big piece in the Valentine's Day Bay Weekly, etc.:

How Lisa met Clyde

how lisa met clyde

bay weekly

Elisavietta Ritchie and Clyde Farnsworth: The wooing of a brilliant loner

Dissident Russian artists was my topic toward an M.A. at American University, so when Norton Dodge, professor of Russian economics and collector of Russian dissidents' paintings, held a conference at his Cremona estate, where several émigré artists and their canvases would be present, I was delighted.

Guests included New York Times journalist Clyde Farnsworth, recently back from Paris. Guessing that Clyde had surely met the existentialist novelist Albert Camus, I settled next to him. Conversation revealed that Camus' The Exile and the Kingdom reflected Clyde's situation as a brilliant loner.

He scribbled his phone number on a matchbook. A month later I called: On my own after 24 years of a mostly good marriage, I didn't suffer for lack of diversion. Nor did Clyde.

I could bring an escort to dinner at my father's friend Dr. George Mishtowt's. An evening of brilliant conversation and Russian songs, and Clyde was a baritone. He also practiced his violin daily.

Our respective children asked, "Why don't you two get married?"

My answer: "He hasn't asked me."

Summer 1992, on the cusp of his transfer to Canada (I assumed another romance over), I drove him to a knee operation. Afterward I settled him in our guest bed while I slept on the couch, at midnight back to the ER, then home again to his bed of pain.

Suddenly at 2am he asked, "Why don't we mosey down to the Prince Frederick courthouse tomorrow and pick up a license?"

I phoned Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, my doctor daughter, then a captain at a military hospital in South Korea. Her answer zoomed across the Pacific: "Do so quickly before the anesthesia wears off!"

Around the world and all these years later, we still have a cottage at Broomes Island and are settling in at Asbury Solomons.


January 2018

Open reading in which several of us will participate follows Grace Cavalieri's reading 6:30 Saturday, December 9th, at Evelyn's in Annapolis. Will be able to read a couple of poems from Harbingers and Babuska's Beads this Saturday in Annapolis as a couple of participants from my Saturday workshop at Jack Bay offered to drive me.

 


 

Visit my books page:

Elisavietta's Books

 

Read my news from 2017 by clicking on this link.

Read my news from 2016 by clicking on this link.

Read my news from 2015 by clicking on this link.

Read my news from 2014 by clicking on this link.

 


creative memoirs

Creative Writing — Creative Memoir

aka:
—Rewrite Your Life—Or Someone Else's—
Workshop at Prince Frederick Library
every second Wednesday

Wednesday, February 13, 2-4 pm

2019 is here and so much going on! I am stealing time to scribble and decipher and re-work-work-work new and ongoing stories, poems and articles.

The Bay Weekly accepted for the Labor Day issue my mini-interviews with Barbara Lorton, singer and musician, and with Samantha Piotros, student and nurse.

CLICK to...

...get inspired! March! 2018

...get inspired! September '18

We are all supposed to be reading, at least dipping into, this year's One Maryland One Book title, All American Boys, and/or at least thinking and perhaps writing about our own experiences with and ideas regarding race relations in schools, workplaces and on the street. The situation in the book is right out of current news. I've emailed you a book review which gives a good sense of the book, and if you at least dip into the book, you quickly see it vividly presents the language of today's teenage boys and their conundrums.

 

The Twelve

I am showcasing some selections of my translations online.
This one, THE TWELVE, by Alexander Blok, has now been revitalized and is presented here as an online book, very closely rendered to it's original formatting.

The graphic above will lead you to my translations page, where THE TWELVE can be found.

 

 

TELLING THE RED

I snap the geraniums in 400 ASP black-and-white
since that's in my camera. They catch sun from snow
piled outside. In my bay window they glow
what my mother might call rather a brazen scarlet.

Each single floret is tiny, fragile, but massed
in a greater sum, big as a fist,
they burn my palms with their light.
Even when petals shrivel, officially finished,

that pungent crimson stays bright.
Yet they print mere icicle gray.
One would suppose, seeing this glossy photo,
my geraniums pink, sappy lavender, white.

These leaves velvet green, must explain.
Recalling my mother's distaste
for what is passé, right before I shot
I clipped what foliage yellowed and dried.

My mother, whose birthday should be today,
insisted on positive attitudes. Oh, I can tell they
are red, she would assure me. Color is not
what matters here, but your composition.

Note interplays, variegated light against
curved shapes, indented, the pick-up-stix
grids of spaghetti twigs bearing blossoms or leaves
versus the thick main stems…You've let them grow

leggy, ungainly, dear, do cut them back...By the rotund
weight of the pots, one knows they are rusty brick.
The planes of ceiling and wall are white as the snow
on black branches outside. As for your voids–

I'm all too aware of the voids. And look! She'd point
to what I see only now, in the space of the pane:
Did you know you caught a cardinal in flight?
Male, you can tell by the crest. Very red.


[earlier versions ©1992 The Christian Science Monitor]


 

ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE's Books

For autographed copies, order directly from the author:
Lisa would love to hear from you as well, letters and comments and reviews most welcome. To purchase books, please include Title of book, price, and $1.50 postage and handling for single orders, plus $1.00 for each additional book on order. Send check or money order payable to Elisavietta Ritchie, addressed: Elisavietta's Books, 11450 Asbury Circle #320, Solomons, MD 20688

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of more than one book or for comments and queries:

Elisavietta Ritchie
11450 Asbury Circle #320, Solomons, MD 20688