Today we are celebrating Pam Muller. Since Deadlines for Writers started in 2017, many of our writers have gone on to publish and accomplish great things with their writing. The Prompt to Publication emails are all about celebrating these writers and their wonderful stories.
I hope these interviews will help and teach you how to use Deadlines for Writers to build your author platform.
Scroll to the end to watch Pam’s interview.
Author feature: I’d like to introduce Pam Muller
Have you completed any of the challenges on Deadlines for Writers?
Pam Muller: Yes, I completed the 12 Poems challenge in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023 and 12 Short Stories in 2021 & 2022.
What have you published?
Pam Muller: I’ve had many poems published in several poetry journals, anthologies and poetry competitions before I joined 12 ss/poem challenges, and also after participating in the challenges. Several poems which had their start in 12 poems challenges have been successes in print. I once had a short story long-listed for a local competition several years ago but I haven’t submitted any short stories since. I am gradually developing confidence in this area.
Has Deadlines for Writers helped you as a writer?
Pam Muller: Essentially it kept me writing! I also belong to two local writer’s groups so that means I have four deadlines a month. I try to keep ahead of things or I panic at the last moment and that usually doesn’t turn out too well.
The heedback is hugely helpful. I think constructive suggestions are invaluable. I don’t always agree and I don’t always change my work just because someone offers constructive criticism, but often I do make the edits and then that can sometimes spark further changes. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to see my work through other people’s eyes and ears. I truly value this wonderful group of writers.
Here is a brief (but heartfelt) mention from the acknowledgement page of my new collection: Thank you to Mia Botha and members of the online writers group www.writerswrite.co.za.
What did you learn that you applied to your work?
Pam Muller: I learned about Show not Tell/dialogue/ surprises& twists/ pushing the story along from your online short story workshops and your kindle book, Write The Crap Out Of It. Previously I had no idea what I was doing. I would make a start but then didn’t know what to do next. I don’t consider myself a good short story writer but I hope I’m improving with practice and learning as I go.
Biography:
Pamela Muller was born in South Africa in 1958 and has been living in the South West of Ireland since 1978. She is married to Etienne and they have a grown up son, Michael and daughter, Diana. She started writing poetry as a hobby twenty-five years ago when she joined a writer’s group in Kenmare. She is also an artist and classical homoeopath. Her debut anthology, ‘New Soil’ is to be launched on 2nd March 2024.
Read Pam‘s poems
New Soil
At the start, you feel something will be lost if you do not look forward,
so you listen and learn to speak in unfamiliar ways,
let go phrases for which you think your newborns will have no use,
rooted, as they must be, in this new soil.
Your chilled probing fingers feel the secrets of dark heavy ground,
so unlike the warm crumbling earth you knew.
You tell yourself the world is round, try to cultivate a mature global outlook.
Your own culture shrinks into storage someplace deep.
Now soft rain dilutes the past,
creates small directional changes in the eddies of your heart.
You don’t know if you can ever belong, or even if that matters.
You are here, and from now on you begin to stop looking back.
In A Field
In a field along the Kerry Way
the cattle graze on cuckoo flowers.
John cautions the children never to go
up by the ring of fairy trees.
They may eat of the first hawthorn leaves,
and the berries like blood drops
are good for the heart. But the blossoms
in Spring must be left for the bees.
After the spawning a heron
comes up from the shore below.
Frogs hide in the rushes, and yellow flag
irises sway in the honey breeze.
In the warmth of the day a blue butterfly
flits over the wild hedge roses,
and Annie once saw, by the old stone wall,
an elf dressed in browns and greens.
Take care little ones where you put your feet,
Please take care how you walk in this field,
for it is shared with the ones you mayn’t see;
it is home both to them, and to ye.
And You, My Love, Still Sleeping
I rose early one morning
when roosters were asleep,
and you, my love, lay dreaming
with songs inside your head.
In a space between the stars
a silent moon-eyed owl,
feathers shadowed, stippled white
watched me move beneath the trees.
From radiating branches
birds awakened and stretched,
nestled close their freckled eggs,
murmured into their wings.
Lunar speckles splashed our bed
as dark eased into dawn,
and you, my love, still sleeping
with songs inside your head.
Charioteer
Time gallops across her breast like wild horses
a tumult of hooves pulsing deep in her chest
sun on their foreheads, heat in their nostrils
stampede of young heartbeats as years rush away.
Carnelian cabochons, a carapace for courage
gems on her throat spur words on her lips
amulet armour for uncertain moments
‘Let there be Love, let there be love.’
Through valley and mountain the charioteer canters
in her crown of dreams, down to the sea
sees futures chiselled for her daughters on gravestones
for her daughters, and daughters, and daughters to come.
Watercolour painting – ‘The Chariot’ by Aia Leu
Buy the book.
New Soil is a wonderful collection by long-standing poet Pamela Muller who writes skillfully in a wide range of forms, from the villanelle, to free verse, and the Japanese haibun. Muller is as comfortable with diverse forms as she is in the diverse locations she so vividly breathes life into. There is a quiet passion for life in these pages and a delicate handling of powerful emotions, from the wrench of exile, the poignancy of loss, to the depths of love forged over time. New Soil is a remarkable debut from a gifted poet.
And you can watch Pam’s launch here:
Well done, Pam!
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