Summer news & Poetry on tap

Jul 05, 2025

Our writers have been busy. Between the yearly anthology, some organizing, and some participating in a local author fair, and releasing new books… well, there’s certainly a lot to catch up on.

June Poetry Slam

Or kind-of-a-poetry-slam. In general, poetry slams are meant to be for people who have finished poems they would like to share. Really, like many things in our group, this was more of a workshop (and our third year doing it!). Thanks to Bevan, we learn about a couple of poem structures, try our hand at writing them, and also share poems that we love.

Of the poems that many of us have strong feelings about, one poet came out on top. Shel Silverstein. Several of us grew up with or read Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and shared the poems from there that stuck with us. Poems like “Sick” and “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stoud Would Not Take the Garbage Out”, or the namesake of the book, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”. Amusingly, many of us had even memorized the poems for school.

The highlight of our Journey members creating poems, though, appears to be haiku. Many of us remember these short poems with their syllable structure of 5-7-5 as we learned in school (5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, 5 in the third), though as we learned, that structure is… complicated because the Japanese language works a bit differently than English (more information can be found here).

That being said, here are some of our members’ poems from the June workshop (though remember, not all are STRICTLY haiku as haiku are also about nature):

BIOS by J.M. Guilfoyle

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Should have checked before
BIOS needs and update
Nevermind, it booted

After the Storm by Ansley Ashe Mysteries

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The clouds are parting, 
Dark earth, muddy puddles
Giant mess, rainbow

We’ll share more with the next newsletter, but here is a poem by NewMexicoKid

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Ideas crack and break,
Shattering against
insecurities, I hide

Grayslake Authorfest

Several of our authors either organized or participated in the recent Grayslake Authorfest! Though it was hotter than heck out, we braved the heat and hopefully made some new fans. Check out some pictures of J.M. Guilfoyle and Gwen Tolios🦄 ♠ holding down their tent, Anne Beall from Chicago Story Press and Eveline Rose. At the end, you can see Gwen and JM with author Katie Lazicki who came out to support (and is a member of the Journey) and Ansley Ashe Mysteries, one of the founders of Grayslake Authorfest!