Pnews, 2024

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January to May

a) Time to finish Stalking Crawlrollies, the Lewis Carroll tribute project I began in the 1990s! At its core, it's an epic nonsense poem. To hybridize it into a semi-graphic novel, I beefed up the mockumentary prose commentary and I  added scores of illustrations ( manipulated digital photography). After hiring an editor on Reedsy, I started right back in again. In May, I made a photographic art book and a downloadable PDF available on blurb.com. Check them out here! https://www.blurb.com/b/12013762-stalking-crawlrollies

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b) Waiting for a soft cover version? I'm working on it. The conversion from RBG to CMYK makes the artwork flat-out dreary; for a publicly available paperback (I have private draft copies), I will need to rethink the art.

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c) In February I helped judge the Virginia state semi-finals of the Poetry Out Loud contest. I've now officiated at every level (classroom; school-wide; city-wide; state semis; 2019 state finals) except the national finals.

 

d) Also in February I was interviewed for an artist profile in the PSV newsletter. The website and newsletter are currently in a state of suspension; I'll post a link when they resuscitate.

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e) And again also in February, Richard Rose did me the immense honor of penning a personal essay in response to my novel The Memory Addicts. Read it on his website, at https://frameshifts.com/2024/02/07/derek-me/, or at the Memory Addicts tab on this website.

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f) In March and April I taught Creative Writing classes at Westminster Canterbury. At the end of the course, most of the participants submitted three pages of writing, which I edited, on Ingram Sparks, into a short book. It's not publicly available, but it inspired them to set up an ongoing WC community writers club.

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g) From December 2023 to May 2024, I ran the Poetry Society of Virginia Submittable site, coordinating the annual contest entries and acting as MC at April's annual awards ceremony, I also served as editor for the winning poems anthology, which will be published shortly by High Tide; more news when it hits its release date. Here’s the link to the awards ceremony, on Bill Glose’s site Virginia Poetry Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q25ZSpic-P0&list=PLaYPMBLAyZMG2FmZKuwCiBQBvSSnIlUwE&index=2

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h) A new ten poem poetry chapbook Found Voices, will be published by Clare Songbirds in the fall of 2024. These are persona tales, mostly dramatic monologues. I’m thrilled to have this collection in the pipeline.

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i) The opening poem in Found Voices, the ten page “Writer Unknown: A Found Journal” recently appeared online in the “Wellspring Literary Journal”—as did a second poem, “A Becoming,” which is included in my MS in progress Sort By Title. Here’s the link: https://wellspringliteraryjournal.com/issue-1-the-source.
 

June—July

a) My vignette “Class Warfare Skirmish” appears in the new Verse-Virtual. Go to: https://www.verse-virtual.org/2024/July/kannemeyer-derek-2024-july.html

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b) Thanks to Kathleen Decker for sponsoring a wonderful “Virginia Poetry Festival” reading at the Richmond Public Library, on June 29. I was one of the six featured readers. Here’s a link to my reading of two of my four poems, “My Father Turns 84,” from Mutt Spirituals, and “A Wasp,” which is intended for Sort By Title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJHStCGCe8&list=PLKQdSGjC4FUqhWHctti9ET61Z30O3xf-u&index=7&t=1s Kathleen hopes eventually to post my two other poems also: “In Memoriam Robert Jarrett Waldron,” from Found Voices, and “In Memoriam The Nonsense Verse Nuts,” from You Go In By The Gate That Isn’t There.

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