Atlantic Center for the Arts An Interview with M.B. McLatchey In her newly appointed role as Arts & Wellness ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, M.B. was asked to comment on her work, the arts, the community, and her new role with ACA. What do you most love about your work combining health and the arts? For me, creating art has always been a way to care for the heart and mind. Working as an Ambassador for ACA, where we consciously join arts initiatives with an interest in healing, has been some of the most rewarding work in the arts that I have ever done. What inspired you to pursue this field? I think art makes us more human – or at least it reminds us of our humanness. Emily Dickinson once said that she writes poems in order to know what time it is. Making art is a wonderful way for us to value the minutes and days in our lives. How have the arts been transformational in your life? Wonderful shifts in ways of seeing – in ways of being -- have occurred for me through my teaching and through my interacting with other poets in New Smyrna Beach and in Volusia County. What’s special about the people of Volusia County or New Smyrna Beach? People who live in our county – especially artists – truly love our surroundings. The flora and sounds of our county frequently color the poems that people produce in my workshops. There’s a wonderful rhythm that we all march to here – it’s a pace and beat that shows up in our poems and visual art. What is the most rewarding part of your work with ACA? The people whom I have had the chance to come to know and love has been the most rewarding part of my work with ACA. So many talented and generous artists make up the community called “ACA”. I have felt very blessed to have been welcomed into this community. 3/28/2019

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 2 of 3 - Is there a Final Exam? This was always the plan. The day and hour, of course, is out of our hands: Dickinson’s Carriage Man; Shelley’s desert sand. Imagine an untethering, a swansong reckoning. No proofs in stone. Almost certainly, you will be alone. The location, like an envelope you have been carrying, will be unsealed – a wakefulness, or a presence revealed: a man who taught you to field ground balls in the yard; devotions you fought and now whose storied part you want again. Or perhaps in a chance encounter with a schoolyard friend, a companion you abandoned for the faster track, the slap on the back. Our lives a history of what-ifs, lighthouses somehow missed. The final exam will not be timed. It will be scored blind. The final exam will leave you among the living, taking stock. Finishings all around; ashes still simmering – and a threshold to cross. Your gift if you use it, time : Gilgamesh, tunnelling trails to a city wall; Penelope’s loom and an ever- unravelling shawl. As for them, so you: there will be threshold guardians – a forest monster, suitors – reveals of the anima. Look these guardians in the eye. They are barriers to test your stamina. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Azure , Vol. 8, March, 2025. Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group's Fall 2024 Writing Contest - First Place. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Pathos, Logos" and "Plan B". Editor's comment: I enjoyed the steady strain of brilliance and the profound sense of wisdom that runs through each poem, well-delivered through narratively evocative language and clearly intentional choices in poetic form! To cloak modernity in a sense of magic is difficult to do, and yet I feel your poems do so in a very useful way. I hope our readers find in these pieces the impetus for an examined life. - Sakina B. Fakhri Previous Next

The Healing Power of Poetry - Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Awareness Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Awareness - 2024 Sponsored by Atlantic Center for the Arts and AdventHealth This article first appeared in Of Poets & Poetry , Nov/Dec 2024. Application is no longer available.

Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award The Retrieval Here again. The way you used to wake us – rouse us with that impatient stare. A stubborn, boy-crazy, eighth-grader you make the same requests. We say them with you. Isn't this what happens when some of us bring water to the dead? This private shift to living only sometimes with the living. Eight months among the missing and you come padding back in your white socks and jeans; specter of grief we locked away before it made us more dry-mouthed and speechless than our counterparts in dreams. Grief like light encounters in a half-sleep: your moist face in a morning mirror. Are you in someone else's too? O, city of mirrors. And how, each night you casually resume at every threshold to every listing room that awkward lean -- the one you would do when you could not ask, but knew that we could help. Your bony shoulder barely touching the wall; your right foot crossing the other. So much the pose of one who is neither coming nor going. It's difficult to know why we should wake. Still, every day we rise like guardians ex officio, like gate-keepers to a city of passing shades -- each one a new acquaintance with your face. Each one a new petition for deliverance of the innocent and quaking. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

We have been together in Buddha’s gentle rain for days. Our robes are soaked through. I try not to long for things as your palm unwinds under my chin. You speak to me in the simplest language, Have a cup of tea. I sense your compassion but my ears are filled with water and the incense unnerves me. You cup my ears and whisper, Rozan is famous for its misty, rainy days, and, The sky is always the sky. I believe you, though I am not surprised. Perhaps the exchange should not be this intimate. The shadows near my eyes and across your shaved head make us tired and ordinary. You are an old man with dry lips. Perhaps your middle sags as you smooth my hair, my hair that was just so. Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the author's chapbook Advantages of Believing , 2015. Author's website: www.mbmclatchey.com Beginner's Mind

Index Previous Next Trigger Warning We have art in order not to die of the truth. ― Friedrich Nietzsche This spring, as in previous springs we will have our themes: A young man will take his mother to bed – then blind himself with her dress pins when he learns the truth. Another mother will die yearning for her son’s lost youth – ten years in combat in some hell called Troy, ten more at sea, a champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece. In our fifth week, the most promising student will stop coming to class – uncounted, unseen. Some of us will look for her in our dreams. In one, she will wave, relieved, as she sails away. In another, she will signal a code – fragments like shards from an ancient, splintered vase; runes like self-spun elegies which, as a class, we will read. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece? In the tenth week, the quietest one will change his place from Enrolled to Audit – a jockeying for a Pass on this charted and uncharted course – or kiss and a roll of the dice. A look at his source. The same week a veteran marine will submit his term’s work – a dense, hard-copy, thoughtful, heap – then swallow and swallow and swallow and finally sleep. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully-carved chess piece? The rest of us will proceed. Like clockwork, carillon will ring. Gowns, assemblies, deans. Swallows will stir the clock tower – Lazarus-like – and crocuses will flower on the campus green. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

Award Winning Poetry - 2006 Winner of the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award Sanriku The game was not to look - but feel - the slow drag, the distant rise and fall, the quiet revolt of crests gaining an underworld; to know in our heels the moment of their advance: languid, insidious. "Sanriku!" one of us would call - a notice to the rest that it was imminent, and with one lift, a solidarity, we'd throw ourselves beachward, tossing and rolling in a curled force. Submerged, I would hear that call like water's moan, or like the heaving sobs of Asian fishermen, who felt too late the slip of plates, the buckling floor, the little missionary wave passing beneath their boats; who, steeped in so much grief, never knew the clarity that follows every quake -- when there, for just an instant, the contours of the seafloor below are mirrored in the water around our waists. Sanriku is a port in Japan that was destroyed by a tsunami in 1896. Fishermen 20 miles out to sea did not notice the wave pass under their boats because it only had the height at the time of about 15 inches. They were totally unprepared for the devastation that greeted them when they returned to the port of Sanriku - 28,000 people were killed and 170 miles of coastline were destroyed by the wave that had passed under them. Copyright © 2003 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2006 Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. Published in Willow Springs 58, Fall 2006. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2012 Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist Catharsis A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts since his doctor recommended more fruit. My head tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke – what Aristotle called a cleansing: the comedy channel in bed. A piecemeal purging meant to clear our minds, a chance to graft, like patchwork, the wreckage of our lives onto a campy figure, cheer for him; love him for dancing when the gods single him out, pile on their twisted trials. As if – for a few moments – we are watching someone else’s life unfold. Pizza and beer, you my armchair, tucked in our sheets. As if – for a few moments – we have climbed up from some well to lounge on sun-baked stone, take in the Dionysian Mysteries: lore of the vine – seasons, grapes, wine. Nothing ever truly dying. And us, tender initiates, laughing so hard we’re crying. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Finalist for the 11th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize . Published in the 2012 Spring issue of S martish Pace . Previous Next

Index Previous Next Synonym for Marriage Pledge – bond, allegiance, alliance, a yearning for a god; mercy, agape, grace; a chance against the odds; a dervish dance; benevolence. In a sentence: The first love was cherubic eros, a child with a flaming torch; gold and leaden arrows, one to arouse – the other for unfathomable sorrow. Deception – duplicitous, the let-down, the Judas Kiss; a double-crossing, ill offering; the trick among tricks that colors history. In a sentence: There was little doubt in ancient days that Medea, slayer of offspring, chariot-maid, was by a spouse – by the stars, by the forces of a spinning earth – betrayed. Forgiveness – pity, mercy, leniency. In a sentence: The earliest Greek dream for repentance is a stable to clean, its benches built for milking cows, not a sinner’s crawl; a purging of the stench of an unkept stall; a never forgotten love, Penelope’s woven – and unwoven – shawl. Faith – hope, truth, fealty, constancy; renewed belief. In a sentence: The ancients were sure the ring finger pointed to the heart. Hence, this never-ending band – once made of leather, bone, ivory – has no region, no mythic stop or start, no legend small enough to capture the difference in a master’s and a servant’s call. . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.

Beginner's Mind From Shipyard to Harvard Yard: Embracing Endless Possibilities by M. B. McLatchey Winner of the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award "Rippling with wisdom and creative genius." - Readers' Favorite ® 5 - Stars “IT’S WONDERFUL TO HAVE A BEGINNER’S MIND.” – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple "Anyone who has been influenced by a beloved teacher will savor this work; educators will especially appreciate it." - Library Journal "Would the bad children please raise their hands?" Discover why that statement and so many more from Beginner's Mind will have you either smiling or crying. For parents of young children, their teachers, homeschooling parents, teachers in training, and all adults interested in discovering a more loving way for children to blossom in school, Beginner's Mind is the how-to book we have been waiting for – a book that describes teaching the way we so passionately want it for our children. Told through the eyes of a very observant ten-year-old who, in real life, did go from shipyard town to Harvard University, Beginner's Mind gently answers the question, How do we want teachers to teach, inspire, and guide our children? Teacher comments: "A must-read for every parent and teacher.” – Kevin McIntosh, Class Dismissed "Read this book and re-open your mind.” – Robert Fleck, PhD, Art History as Science History "Beginner’s Mind has galvanized my teaching. ” – Frankie Rollins, The Grief Manuscript "The perfect gift for every teacher, from every loving parent." - Reader's Favorite More Info: Video Trailer for Beginner's Mind Of Poets & Poetry: Prerelease Book Interview Readers' Favorite 2021 Five-Star Reviews Beginner's Mind in the Classroom A Poem by the Author - "Beginner's Mind" About the Author ERAU Industry Day Poster Praise by Teachers for Beginner’s Mind : “Quirky, wise, fierce, impossibly creative, Miss D is the fourth-grade teacher we all wish we had. Risk-taking and grace-under-pressure are among the lessons she teaches her students in a hardscrabble shipyard town, sometimes at great cost. M.B. McLatchey has repaid the gift in full, adding Miss D to that pantheon of teachers we never forget, who change our lives forever – for the better. A must-read for every parent and teacher.” — Kevin McIntosh, Class Dismissed “Einstein said he loved talking to young children because they hadn’t yet been brainwashed by education. In the sciences, it is so important to look at nature with an open mind, without preconceived notions and biases. M.B. McLatchey captures all of this in Beginner’s Mind , revealing its secrets to the reader through the innocent eyes of a remarkable fourth grader. Read this book and re-open your mind.” — Robert Fleck, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Art History as Science History from the Paleolithic to the Present “M.B. McLatchey’s readers encounter a visionary in this memoir about her fourth-grade classroom, a place where the dictionary becomes a ‘Sanctuary,’ where students leave space at the top of their papers for Big Ideas, and where the Busy People’s constant motion isn’t considered a nuisance but made useful instead. The teacher, Miss D, insists that her students learn to trust themselves in a world where authority offers little room for singularity. ‘Don’t look back,’ she urges us, because every day is another chance to choose how you want to live your life. Beginner’s Mind has galvanized my teaching.” — Frankie Rollins, The Grief Manuscript “This is the work of an original, smart, and talented writer. She has a great storehouse of knowledge and a penetrating understanding of many subjects, including human beings. It is wonderful to read someone who knows a capella, Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, as well as Carol Channing and Hepburn (and knows the difference). When has a school room been given such vivid enunciation – the dioramas, shoe boxes, sticker-stars, and clay figure, the comfort of “half-truths” for other children, but not for Miss D’s. With a “sideways glance,” they took it all in, and were forgiving, like Miss D (whose door says welcome, an endless acquittal). It is difficult to see any of us “condemned,” and yet, there are standards. Standards! I can’t go on admiring line after line, when I am only on the first two pages in my commentary (and my language is so stupid and pale in comparison), but that’s what this essay does to me; it says look, see, remember. Word for word, sentence by sentence, I am enthralled. Thank God for Miss D, and for being reminded that at least one or two of my own teachers were, if not her equals, close sisters. While the writer appears like a new comet on my horizon, I am wild to know what this writer will do next. Meanwhile, she will be “graded,” though A+ hardly describes my admiration.” — Emily Herring Wilson, Judge, Penelope Niven Award in Creative Nonfiction The Center for Women Writers, Salem College "McLatchey pens a love letter to her fourth grade teacher, Katherine Arthur Dunning, an extraordinarily gifted and unconventional educator who for years taught in the public schools of North Weymouth, MA . The "beginner's mind" of the book's title describes the innocence and curiosity of young children, which Dunning (whom McLatchey refers to as "Miss D") sought to cultivate. The author vividly describes her dynamic fourth grade classroom, where Miss D focused on big ideas, eliminated labels such as "good" and "bad" to describe students, designated the dictionary as a "sanctuary," and helped hyperkinetic students channel their energy through additional tasks. Interspersed throughout are brief letters from Miss D to the author, charting their enduring relationship over decades. VERDICT Anyone who has been influenced by a beloved teacher will savor this work; educators will especially appreciate it." —Elizabeth Connor, Daniel Lib., The Citadel, Military College of South Carolina, Charleston Library Journal Where to Order: Regal House Publishing Amazon Barnes & Noble Book details: Publisher : Regal House Publishing Language : English Paperback : 230 pages I SBN-10 : 1646030680 ISBN-13 : 978-1646030682 Item Weight : 12.6 ounces Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.58 x 8.5 inches

Award Winning Poetry - 2020 Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Afterlives Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering into a starless space, not knowing what to do except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box: What’s new with you? We talk, in turns. We share the virtual part – meaning the essence . It’s lovely. How this half-body huddle forces us to talk; how we conform, like grafted stalks, to a new light source. Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal. I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously. No one can see me gazing at our years. My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images, expressions like true selves they made as toddlers. On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats. How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream. No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers; only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say, more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too. Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Art s , Issue #1, Fall 2020. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2024. Previous Next