- I think I always saw the world in pictures and words.

My family is filled with visual artists, but I paint in words.

My dreams have voiceovers.

When I was a kid, I started to write poetry, and then I started to write new lyrics to songs for family members for occasions and things like that.

I went to college pretty certain that that's what I would do, and studied writing, and then turned towards education and became overwhelmed with the importance of it and spent 33 years not writing poetry.

I had some chronic illness and I had to retire young, and I opened my computer one day and out fell a poem, and it just began as if it had never been interrupted.

So for the last almost 15 years, I've just been writing like mad.

- That's beautiful, especially having that break.

You probably had all that pent up, creative energy just ready to explode once you're out of the system.

- And life experience, right?

I graduated college when I was 20, so when I was 19, how much life experience did I have to base a writing career on?

- Yeah, that's very true.

So let's dive into your anthology called "Thriving."

Give us a little bit about this book, the concept and everything behind it.

- Yeah, I'm so happy about it.

I approached Saratoga Arts for an individual artist grant, a NYSCA regranting program, and told them I wanted to create an anthology around the theme of thriving.

I have had a lot of stuff in my life that's made it hard to keep coming back, but I do, and I began to wonder about that.

And with COVID and all of the things going on in the world that is creating so much anxiety, I wanted to focus on what it is that allows people to keep returning to a robust state, a joyful state, a robust state, a productive state.

I didn't want to focus only on how I do it, because that's not particularly useful to anybody else.

I didn't even really have a set idea of how I wanted it to look or what I wanted people to say about it.

I wanted it to be imaginative, and I wanted to throw it out there and see what came back.

I got the grant and I did both local and broad calls for submissions.

I got about 800 individual works submitted, from which came 87 works from 64 people.

- Yeah, now let's dive a little bit into the curation process of this, because that's a lot of artists, and it's not just filled with poems.

There's a little bit more in it, so would you give us a little bit of background on that?

- It's multi-genre, so there are a lot of poems and there are photographs and short pieces of fiction and short pieces of what we now call creative nonfiction, some of which is memoir and some of which is observational.

I was very clear in the call for submission that this wasn't a how-to, that this wasn't a spiritual guide to a particular path.

Show me in your imagination what thriving looks like, feels like, takes out of you, gives to you, whatever that is, and these crazy things came back.

I mean, a story about somebody whose musician brother who passed away is leading him on an international journey to Prague to a particular day on a particular Mozart concert, and then somebody else talking about reframing life with a partner who has Alzheimer's.

Somebody's talking about every single day as an addict not using, and that that person can look like a bottle of Coors.

It was all over the place, and the contributors, some of them are vastly experienced and published, and a few of them have never published anything before now, including one local contributor who's got two pieces in here.

Some of it are people who just have it and are beginning to emerge as artists and others are so polished and really know how to communicate in their modes.

- So let's dive into the concept of thriving, because that's what the book is mostly about.

You're taking all these different perspectives and saying, "How do you thrive within this?

How do you thrive?"

So what is the importance to you of teaching how to thrive and having people learn how to thrive?

- And me, how I can learn, right?

I didn't want to impose a view on this, so I learned from it.

That was my, I was gonna open my intuitive, creative mind and let these works flood into me.

We are in an era where coping skills are not necessarily taught well and are not necessarily available for us easily, and yet the need to cope is growing.

That distinction with COVID and all of the things going on, the mental health and the sense of despair and lack of control or power being flooded at us from social media, from news all the time, what can I possibly do?

And yet, the truth is that the only things that have ever changed societies or individual people actually changing from that downward spiral somehow up, and so I felt that the timing was valuable, that a piece that didn't preach at anybody, that didn't say there's one way to do it, but just shows the struggle, the opening, the sense of community and the exuberance, which is the final section, the exuberance of those moments when you really are thriving before the next obstacle trips you up a little bit again.

- Yeah, but how you keep recovering, using this as a tool, to be honest.

When I'm going to read the whole thing, I'm gonna probably learn so much of how do I thrive within my own world, and when things get dark, how do I thrive within the darkness, too?

Because that's the hard part as artists and creatives.

- None of it is about leaving reality behind.

It is about a reframing and sets of decisions.

You see different people make different sets of decisions.

For some it's intuitive and it's their nature, they're positive, and some of the writers here, they are not intuitively and naturally positive people.

So you can learn almost more from them than from somebody who just does it.

- That's true, that's very true.

So, where can folks, when's the release date and when can people purchase it?

- It's GoldenLeafBooks.com.

You'll find it as a new release book.

It's in pre-order until June 4th, and you can get 15% off.

After that, it's just ordered, and then over time we'll have it at out so that people could buy it online and at other bookshops.

- Yay!

Well, thank you for sitting down to talk to us about this amazing creative endeavor you and this beautiful community of artists really put some hard work into, and I can't wait to read it myself.