Carie Juettner

My Words in the World

It’s always a thrill to find out something I wrote will be shared with the world. Nothing beats receiving an acceptance. Writing requires patience and thick skin and endurance, and it’s nice to be rewarded once in a while. I’m grateful to each editor, judge, and small press who has given my words a home.

Lately, I’ve had the good fortune of placing several of my pieces in anthologies. Here’s where you can read my words, if you choose.

Recent Publications:

Cover_1024x1024 From “Teardrops and Watermelon Seeds”:

“Just as I rounded the corner, a ladybug from the garden flew across the grass, landed next to the teardrop-shaped mark on my left hand, and disappeared. All that was left was the shadow of her insect body on my skin, my freckles masquerading as her spots. I drew in my breath and blinked, but the image stayed.”

I’m so happy that my story “Teardrops and Watermelon Seeds” found a home in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Volume VII. This magical, coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old girl and a summer full of changes is a personal favorite of mine. I’m elated to finally be able to share it with readers.

My haiku “writing with a view” and my series of haiku titled “Get a Cat (or Don’t)” were published in the Poetry Society of Texas 2016 Book of the Year, and my poem “Underneath” appears in Encore: Prize Poems of the NFSPS 2015, which just came out.

“The Morning After” will be in the 2017 Texas Poetry Calendar, which is available for pre-order now at the Dos Gatos Press website. The poem takes a humorous look at holiday decorations after the holidays have ended.

PicMonkey Collage2

Coming Soon:

I’m grateful to the judges of the 2016 Austin Poetry Society Annual Awards and the 2016 NFSPS Annual Awards who chose a few more of my poems to receive prizes. “Rooster with a Guitar” and “I Hate Those Poems” will appear in Best Austin Poetry 2015-2016 coming out later this year, and “Cicada Emerging” and “The Footprints” will be published in Encore: Prize Poems of the NFSPS 2016 next summer.

* * *

A big thanks to my friends and family who support my writing career, to my poetry critique group for all their wonderful advice and companionship, and to anyone who reads my work and smiles. 🙂 I appreciate you.

* * *

To see a list of all of my published work, click here.

Have a question about my writing? Post it in the comments or use the “Ask the Author” feature on my Goodreads page.

A Father’s Gifts

I’m thankful that I have a father in my life, and I’m extremely thankful to have one as fun and unique and loving as my dad.

My dad has given me so many things: love, support, laughter, poetry books, one-of-a-kind Halloween-birthday parties, and road trips, to name a few. He gave me my nose (slightly crooked like his) and my ability to snore (thanks, Dad). He coached my softball team, attended all my band concerts, taught me to drive, and let me have the puppy I asked for without even checking with Mom first. (It’s ok, she loved the puppy too.)

My dad was the first person to read my whole novel. He stayed up most of the night to finish it. I woke up the next morning to find the manuscript sitting on the kitchen table with a sticky note that said, “Loved it.” You can bet that made me feel good.

While pets and sports and birthday parties are not unusual father/daughter activities, my dad has also given me a few gifts over the years that aren’t quite so common.

Made With Love

Some of the coolest things my dad has given me are his stories and his artwork, which are kind of the same thing. His stories paint vivid pictures and his artwork definitely tells tales, sometimes literally. I have four binders full of the mail he sent me in college, each letter inside an envelope covered with his ink and watercolor drawings, many depicting funny family moments. And I have a computer file full of his life stories, emailed to me in pieces over the past seven years.

To see some of his artwork envelopes and read one of his stories (about chickens), visit this Father’s Day post from four years ago.

IMG_0001 copy — A snippet from one of his painted envelopes, depicting a classic dad moment

Dad also likes to make things. I have a beautiful and very sturdy (read “extremely heavy”) bookcase that he built for me in college and a walking stick that he carved and varnished with his own two hands. I also have several homemade Halloween decorations including this awesome haunted birdhouse he gave me for my birthday in 2014.

Build a nest if you DARE, little birdies!

Stories and drawings and homemade crafts still aren’t too far outside the norm, when it comes to presents, but a few of my father’s gifts have been truly weird.

People Say I Have My Father’s Eyes… They’re Half Right

About fifteen years ago, my dad gave me a coin purse made out of a frog. You heard me.

FrogPurse

Several months ago, my dad gave me an Aztec figurine, found in Mexico decades ago and given to him by a friend. It resides in this plastic container because, three times when I’ve picked it up, it has shot an electric pain into my thumb for reasons I can’t explain. I’m not kidding.

IMG_20160615_151620

And recently, my dad gave me his glass eye. Well, not HIS glass eye. It’s the glass eye that he’s had since I was a kid, the one he took out of the lost and found at his work after it had been there for years. I’m assuming he washed it at some point. (Note: His real eyes, like mine, are hazel. This one is brown.) Anyway, now it’s mine.

IMG_20160617_205611 (1)

Weird? Yes. Totally. TOO weird? No. Not at all. You see, my dad knows me. He probably knew that I would keep that frog purse in my classroom and find delight in shocking my students with it. He probably knew that the cool (and also creepy) Aztec figurine would end up in one of my horror stories. (Draft still in progress.) He probably knew that every time I looked at the glass eye, I would think about how he sometimes used to clasp his hands over his face and stagger around, complaining that he had something in his eye before finally saying, “I think I got it,” and opening his fingers to reveal… the glass eye resting in his palm. And he knew that would make me smile.

I love my father’s gifts. All of them. And I love him.

FathersDayBlogPhoto — **Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I love you! 🙂**

Book Review: Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

IMG_20160609_125003

This is less a book review and more an author review.

In January, I read The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma. It was amazing. As I said in my review on Goodreads, I never expected to like the book as much as I did. I don’t choose to read books about ballerinas and I’m generally not interested in prison stories. But The Walls Around Us, which is both a ballerina story and a prison story, gripped me from the first page and never let me go. It was Suma’s writing that drew me in. So poetic. So magical. Her method of weaving the different character’s stories together was flawless.

I don’t know how many people I’ve recommended this book to in the last six months. I think I even recommended it to some people twice. (Yes, I see many of you nodding.) I can’t help it. The book stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So the day I recommended it to a writer friend and she said, “Yeah, isn’t it good? Although I liked her first book even better,” I did a double take. What? No. Impossible. The idea that the author could have written something better than The Walls Around Us even earlier in her writing career? I couldn’t believe it. I refused to. Then I realized I was being stupid and bought Imaginary Girls. Just, you know, to prove my friend wrong.

Power in Every Sentence

I read the book in four days. The day I opened it, I read over a hundred pages before sleep claimed me. The first thing I did the next morning was pick up where I left off. I feel like I deserve a medal for every chore I accomplished, errand I ran, and meal I ate during those four days. That’s how hard it was to put the book down.

Summary of Imaginary Girls from Goodreads:

Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

Imaginary Girls is a sister story, but it is also so much more. The summary really can’t capture the magic of the book—neither the actual magic threaded through the novel, nor the magic of Suma’s voice and style. There is power in every sentence of her writing. She is a master of moving the story forward with every word, of telling the reader just enough to keep us reading and leaving out the unnecessary bits that we don’t need to know.

Here is one tiny example from page 102:

“They waited for the late hour to do their looking. Tonight I wondered how many of them were here. Maybe they formed a chain from the rocky bottom, locking webbed fingers to slippery wrists, lifting the lightest one to the top, where the water broke open and the air got them gasping and Pete’s car could be made out on the hill.”

This paragraph says so little, but conjures so much, more I think than would have been achieved by adding more description.

I Believe

This book involves casual magic and supernatural powers and underwater towns, and I believed every word of it. At this point, I think Nova Ren Suma could tell me anything and I would believe her. I’m convinced that, like some of her characters, she must have magical powers too. Thankfully, she uses them for good, crafting absolutely stunning prose.

To sum up, I owe my friend a big thanks and a cup of coffee for recommending Imaginary Girls to me. However, I won’t go so far as to say she was RIGHT because I think Imaginary Girls and The Walls Around Us are equally phenomenal. 🙂

At this point, I will read anything Nova Ren Suma writes. If you enjoy magical, poetic, intensely engaging YA novels, you should too. Here’s the link to her books on Amazon. I just ordered 17 & Gone.

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 2.00.44 PM