After Shocks Poet Nancy Tupper LingSeeks Submissions for Anthology of Toasts

Nancy Tupper Ling is seeking submissions of poems that would serve as toasts, graces, and blessings for an anthology that she is co-editing with June Cotner.

The main purpose of TOASTS: The Essential Collection of More Than 500 Toasts, Graces, and Blessings is to offer inspiration and confidence to those who will be giving toasts. Readers should be able to find toasts that will be appropriate and enjoyable for every occasion, from anniversaries to funerals to all holidays to weddings. The list is very broad.

The editors’ desire is to find new and creative toasts that will appeal to a broad range of readers, including those in their 20s and 30s. TOASTS will be the primary book consulted when a toast is expected at an event.

The categories will include the following: Adventures, Anniversaries, Art and Inspiration, Award Presentations, Babies, Best Wishes, Birthdays, Bon Voyage Parties, Business Events, Charity, Children, Christenings, Class Reunions, Creativity and Imagination, Family, Family Reunions, Fortune & Prosperity, Friends, General Blessings, General Celebrations, General Toasts, Good Luck, Graces, Graduations, Gratitude/Joy, Guests, Happiness, Health, Homecoming, Host & Hostess, Housewarming, Love & Romance, Memorial/Funeral Gatherings, New Job, Patriotic Toasts, Pets, Retirement, Roasts, Weddings, Wisdom. Plus holiday toasts, including: New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fools’ Day, Passover, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa.

Submissions must be emailed or mailed no later than April 30, 2013, following these guidelines:

Please email no more than three submissions, each as a separate Word document and all inside one email message. If your submissions are exactly what we’re seeking, you will be invited to submit more.

All submissions must be double-spaced in Times New Roman 12 with all of your contact info single-spaced on the upper left corner.

Use TOASTS as your subject line followed by your last name.

Submissions should be anywhere from 2-6 lines and easy to say out loud. Submit only those selections that can be spoken easily in a group setting. “Graces” and “Blessings” should also be short. All Graces and Blessings should be interfaith. The editors encourage the submission of humorous toasts, too!

Email submissions to submit@finelinepoets.com.

If submitting via postal service, you will receive a response if you enclose an SASE along with your submissions. Please mail submissions to Fine Line Poets, Executive Center #247, 1600 Boston Providence Highway, Walpole, MA 02081.

TOASTS: The Essential Collection of More Than 500 Toasts, Graces, and Blessings will be published by Viva Editions. They publish “Books for Vivacious Living!” and they were founded four years ago by Brenda Knight at a pivotal point in time, as the stock market plummeted, the economy softened, and businesses tightened and cut back. Viva focuses on expansion, courage, and joy in life. In short, Viva is about the very best in the human spirit. Please visit them at Viva Editions .

Payment is one copy of the book for each published selection for non-exclusive rights. You retain all rights.

For full information on submissions, feel free to visit Toasts Anthology.

Nancy Tupper Ling is the winner of the prestigious Writer's Digest Grand Prize and the Pat Parnell Poetry Award.

She draws her inspiration from the multicultural background of her family and the interwoven fabric of familial culture which is, on the surface, seemingly everyday. She is the author of My Sister, Alicia May (Pleasant Street Press) and the founder of Fine Line Poets. Currently she resides in Walpole, Massachusetts with her husband, Vincent, and their two girls.

“Another New England Winter”by Nancy Tupper Ling

By February we’re weary.
Four o’clock’s darkness
descends again over
our sterile snow drifts,
trapping us behind doors,
drawn curtains that keep
drafts and neighbors at bay.
Even diehard Yankees wonder
if spring will come.

We’ve faced such dormancy
before: five years waiting
for a tiny life to flower
inside my womb. Then, too,
we shut shades early
against sounds, voices
of nearby children
sledding into our gully,
alone with Mourning.

Come March we notice
first buds unfurling.
We crack our windows,
let in light breezes.
They carry pollen,
fresh and sticky
to our sills.


Reprinted by permission of the poet from her chapbook Coming Unfrozen (Blue Light Press, 2010). The poem also appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events


Interview With Nancy Tupper Ling

How did you come to write “Another New England Winter”?

I wrote this poem in winter, a New England winter, when we tend to retreat into our homes, away from our neighbors. I remember listening to the voices of children sledding into the next door gully and that brought me back to a time of great sadness in my life, waiting for years to have our first child. When I wrote, I was emerging out of the darkness of infertility. I felt the renewed hope that comes with spring.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

I was on the other side, having emerged from the longing and loneliness of infertility. At last we had our long-awaited child, but it was bittersweet. I didn’t want to forget where I’d come from, or lose the empathy I had for others suffering the same heartache.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

More than any other time in my life, words overflowed onto the pages of my journal. Looking back, I know these poems weren’t my best work, but they were a healing work. During this time of crisis and afterwards, I began to submit my poems to the world. One of the hardest things about any life-shattering event is the lack of control. The very process of writing and submitting my work took my mind off of the things I couldn’t control, and brought joy back into my life. Eventually, I collected my published poems into a book called Laughter in My Tent, hoping to reach other couples who battled with the same emotions.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I love so many of the poets in After Shocks. Recently, I discovered Michael Miller’s book, Darkening the Grass, published by CavanKerry Press. What a work of beauty by a man in his eighth decade of life. It gives me hope! Also, being totally biased, I will mention some of my fellow Fine Line Poets: J. Lorraine Brown, JoAnne Preiser, Fran Witham, Marcia Szymanski, Virginia Bradley, and my mom, Jean Tupper. Do I sound like someone receiving her Oscar?

What are you working on now?

So nice of you to ask! I’ve been concentrating on my picture book manuscripts. Also, I am co-authoring a book called Toasts: The Essential Collection of More Than 500 Toasts, Graces, and Blessings with June Cotner. It’s being published by Viva Editions and submissions are welcome to Toasts Anthology.

Nancy Tupper Ling is the winner of the prestigious Writer's Digest Grand Prize and the Pat Parnell Poetry Award. She draws her inspiration from the multicultural background of her family and the interwoven fabric of familial culture which is, on the surface, seemingly everyday. She is the author of My Sister, Alicia May (Pleasant Street Press) and the founder of Fine Line Poets. Currently she resides in Walpole, Massachusetts with her husband, Vincent, and their two girls.

"This New Never" by J. Stephen RhodesA Poem After Loss of Child

This New Never

This new never is quiet enough to fill a hundred caves
with monks. The wind rushes up from our pasture,
bends the pines and brings no news. I whisper
your name and look at your picture on the desk,
the one where you smile like the Little Flower
of Lisieux, willing your pain into someone else’s joy,
if only you could decode the mysterious how.

You’ve been gone two months in this new forever
where I can’t call you Sunday afternoons
to talk about your last college course, on silence,
a subject we both longed to comprehend and
entered in awkward minutes when we didn’t know
what to say from the desert inside, each of us
craving the sound of wind across the mouths of caves.

Some days I swear not to eat. Then you make me break
my vow. You say, in my head, don’t be stupid, and I want
to retort, the way you were, but don’t because you hurt
enough, your eyes tired of looking for I’ll-never-know
what but perhaps a visit with one of your obscure poets
who helped you think yourself to that beach in Mexico
where you sat alone with the black dog watching the surf.

I look for any ever or always where you might be hiding,
your little girl self leaning out from behind the black oak
in our front yard, you in your pink and yellow dress
playing peekaboo with me. I listen to the sky. In the quiet
you speak: I’m not there, buddy. No dice. But I’m OK.


"This New Never" reprinted with permission of the poet from his collection The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications, 2008). Also published in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life Shattering Events

Interview With J. Stephen Rhodes

How did you come to write “This New Never”?

I wrote it in the year after my 21-year-old daughter’s suicide. I was trying to make some sort of sense out it for myself--how to move on.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

I believe this poem, like many others I wrote at the time, helped me to express my grief and thus to not be dominated by it. It also helped me recover my appreciation for my daughter’s beauty and goodness. And it also helped me turn my grief into something that conveyed beauty—at least to me.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I directed this poem to my daughter—it’s a “you” poem, and that sense of address gave birth to its language and images. It allowed for “singing” (a lyric) I might not have discovered otherwise.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I’ve been quite taken recently with two Irish poets, Paula Meehan and Michael Longley, both of know something of recovering from life’s wounds and who know how to sing without being obscure or cute. Robert Cording, Suzanne Cleary, and Mark Jarman have come to mean quite a lot to me. Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop remain guiding lights.

What are you working on now?

I’m having a lot of fun working on a poetic bestiary in collaboration with the gifted artist, Amanda Chao. Animals figure prominently in a lot of my poems. I’m also trying to figure out how to write “religious” poetry (since I’m a religious person), and also poems that speak to the environmental crisis and the wider problems it engenders. Stephen Dunn’s warnings on the inherent dangers of such writing challenge me, but I still feel “called” to try.

J. Stephen Rhodes writes about living on the edges between security and fear, guilt and grace, as well as between country and city, and prosperity and scarcity.

His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Shenandoah, International Poetry Review, The Texas Review, The William and Mary Review, and Tar River Poetry. His poetry collection, The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications, 2008), won enthusiastic reviews from Suzanne Cleary (Trick Pear), Fred Marchant (Full Moon Boat), and Leatha Kendrick (Heart Cake). His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Brevity, and Sojourn, among others. He has won a number of literary awards including a fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences (2007) and Second Place in the Bright Hill Press Book Contest (2006). He was selected to read for the Kentucky Great Writers Series in 2010. He has written professionally since 1987. He lives in Berea.

Regarding his poems and essays, he comments, “I want to write in a way that offers hope for people like myself who are more than a little overwhelmed by modern life. I want to be honest about the brokenness that besets us, but I am also looking for beauty in the midst of that brokenness.” For example, in his essay “Dark Glasses in Church” (Gettysburg Review), he describes making the transition from being a married, plane-hopping administrator to being a divorced, small-town pastor: “I felt like I was spinning inside a washing machine while looking through a sudsy window at my wife, children, vocation, and the rest of the world.” Or in his poem, “What was Taken,” he reflects on leaving the world of security for the world of anxiety after being the victim of a break-in:

    Tonight it’s hard to sleep
    because the door still swings open in my mind
    letting in strange fingers I might have seen
    today putting coins in a parking meter
    or shaking out cigarettes while I walked
    by and waved as I often do

Steve Rhodes grew up in Atlanta in the 1950’s and 1960’s in a white-painted brick house on a quiet street in a moderately well-to-do neighborhood. “Before 1960, I thought of my family as a ‘Leave It To Beaver’ kind of family. The 1960’s yanked me all over the place: warehouse work, a gruesome private school, bad acne, ditch-digging, a mother who drank too much, being kicked out of Boy Scouts, “God is dead,” Campus Crusade for Christ, VISTA, working with developmentally challenged children, and service as a conscientious objector working in a hospital during the Viet Nam War.”

The subsequent three and a half decades have only served to widen this exposure to different worlds: pastoral work at a inner-city church and two small town churches, the deep south, Appalachia and Central America, stints as a seminary dean and as the director of a non-profit organization.

In addition to a Ph.D. in Theological Studies from Emory University, Rhodes received his M. Div. from Columbia Theological Seminary, his B.A. from Eckerd College, and his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine-Stonecoast.