The Ardent Writer Press welcomes author Toni Ortner with her musings on life in the surreal

Daybook III: Morning is Long Since Gone.

“Toni Ortner’s Daybook III, Morning Is Long Since Gone infuses her inner life’s dreamscape, her singing tree with realities that scream over the land. Ortner’s surreal meditations in corridors persistent with memory evoke a world of redemption shattered in the ashes of hope. She writes in a minor key, for love, for life, with apocalyptic images that disturb and surprise. Listen, as Ortner’s waves rhythmically wash over us, like murmured prayers trapped in frozen rivers, crossing borders into a metaphysical disturbance in the field. She invokes: Is this what it means to grow old,

To fold space around you like a cloak.
Terry Hauptman
Author/Poet of On Hearing Thunder, The Indwelling of Dissonance, and The Tremulous Seasons, a triptych of poetry books from the North Star Press

FROM THE AUTHOR

The Daybook Series is inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf in which she said, “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something… so elastic that it will embrace anything solemn, slight, or beautiful that comes to mind. I should like it to reflect the light of our life.”
Daybooks I and II were published by Deerbrook Editions. The entries in the Daybook III Morning Is Long Since Gone are dated and contain what drew my attention like a magnet. It might be a conversation, a dream, climate change, the plight of refugees, a memory, a letter to the dead, or a vision of the future. I try to capture the spontaneous flow of the mind at play.

I have written since the age of six and have had 26 books published by small presses. Honesty is critical, and I have not minced words when dealing with difficult subjects such as cancer, death, betrayal, divorce, poverty, the loss of love, illness, or breakdowns. I can’t say my life is exceptional because my readers have experienced some of these circumstances too. I write what happens to integrate it. Writing has helped me to survive.

Since March l3 I have been writing a Pandemic Journal that expresses the fears and anxieties most of us feel as a result of the spread of the virus. I am high risk and was isolated for two months before I removed my mask to move closer to my daughter and her family.
I do not take my health for granted; each day I celebrate the beauty of nature in Vermont.

If you want to see my recent work or reviews of previously published books go to toniortner.com and look at Old Lady Blog which is my column.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Steve and Doyle for their critical feedback, editing, and support of my work. I could not ask for a more wonderful publisher.

For more information about Toni and her works, visit  http://toniortner.com/

A list of some of Toni’s works and links are as follows:

Giving Myself over to J.S. Bach

The Ides of March: Selected Early Poems

Writing Shiva

Entering Another Country

Dream in Pienza and Other Poems: Selected Poems 1963–1977

Fractured Woman

A White Page Demands Its Letters

Summoned

Never Stop Dancing

Real Stories: The All-Inclusive Textbook for Developmental Writing and Reading