Kristen's Poetry
Kristen has enjoyed poetry since her youth. She remembers wrote little stories before she was ten years old, and she went on to write really bad poetry in high school, then she found haiku after graduate school. Then, in 2017 she wandered into a generative poetry workshop at Santa Monica’s Camera Obscura. Since then, she has incorporated poetry writing into her creative practice. She continues to participate in workshops with local and visiting poets.
You can find Kristen’s poetry in: Blue Heron Review, Voice of Eve, Contrary Magazine, Menacing Hedge, and The Sunday Times.
The Fridge Poems
From the first time she saw refrigerator magnets, Kristen was hooked. She received her first set of magnetic words from her Auntie Ruthie and the magnets were continually arranged and rearranged–by Kristen and by guests–into funny phrases, messages, etc.
Then, at OSU’s Shotpouch collaborative writing residency, she spent time her first day at the cabin orienting, taking in the solace and solitude of the cabin and creating a fridge poem with the magnets available.
At a certain point during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kristen decided to bolster her magnet collection. She went in search of poetry word magnets and ordered several sets, including a Grimm’s fairytale set, a garden set, book-lover’s and music lover’s sets, an Italian-language set (yes, Kristen spends time daily studying and practicing Italian so that one day she can listen to Italian opera without relying so heavily on sub-titles) and she was gifted a Spanish-language set by a friend.
Heaven! Magnets galore!
She began creating daily poems for a spell to help alleviate the stress and strangeness of the stay-at-home order as it stretched out before and behind her on the pandemic timeline. For fun, she shared these on social media and found a devout and enthusiastic audience for them. She created stand-alone poems based on fairytales and then she began on Little Red Riding Hood, who she found had quite a lot to say. The poem stretched into a series. “Into the Woods” is the first poem in the series.
Fans of the fridge poems have requested a book of the poems, which is in the works. For now, enjoy the first in the Little Red Riding Hood Series…
