Deborah DeNicola is a poet, editor, memoirist and college professor of Creative Writing and literature. I’ve written every since I learned to write. I think it might have helped that I had an older brother who wrote and he was like my mentor/tormentor. He’d assign me certain books to read and I just accepted him as my  teacher. We subscribed to the old “Classics Illustrated” which were wonderful comic books of the Great Canon.  As a kid I used to write mostly stories and didn’t start writing  poetry till adolescence, of course, love poems came first. Currently I’m busy marketing my memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here; A Memoir of Awakening, and my dream process workshops as well as my mentoring new writers. I do two things: I help people process dreams, discover meaning, amplify their dreams, and relate them to issues in their current life. I also help writers develop material, create their book with exercises in writing, edit their work, and find the order and sequence of their experiences. My days vary considerably depending on what I’m working on. I had a schedule when I was writing the book steadily and teaching. Almost three years ago I came to Florida from Boston because my mother was ill. I ended up staying because of her.  Let me start with favorite writers. Oh, so many. I love contemporary fiction, read all nationalities but I am also a classic scholar. All the Greek material; I read and taught Ovid, Homer, the major Greek playwrights. I compiled and edited an anthology of contemporary poetry on Greek myths called Orpheus & Company, published by University Press of New England. It had some course adoption which was nice for me.  The Harvard Review called it “An important book.” As much as I could I taught what I loved or was interested in, the poetry of Rumi and Rilke, the Romantics, the Moderns, poetry being my first love. I designed and taught a class on the literature of war which deeply moved me. It struck me that Homer’s Illiad , the first book in Western Civilization, says everything that’s ever been said about war, it’s glory and it’s horror. I have been troubled to understand this dichotomy. I read a lot of Viet Nam novels, a lot on the Serbo-Croatain tragedies, and the literature of the Holocaust.   For some reason I was drawn to try and understand the concept of evil. In many ways, my book looks for answers to that question. I believe we are all One, living in the illusion of separation. I’m a Course in Miracles practitioner. Fear and ignorance of our true spiritual connection are basically the reasons we don’t treat each other well. The lack of understanding that everything we think and feel has a frequency that attracts situations to us is probably to blame. I think however, that as bad as the world looks, these ideas are spreading exponentially. Spirituality has exploded into its own industry.  The unconscious mind is a treasure trove. And if we can take back and own our projections, and realize everything in our dreams, atmosphere, landscape, objects, figures, are ALL US, we will see we all have the same fears and complexes. When we make those conscious, we have more compassion for ourselves and others. We can’t change others, we can only change ourselves, change our reactions to stimulus of our separation. I fervently believe this. But it is so difficult to change our neuron pathways because our unconscious mind does not always believe what we consciously want to create. We do create our reality, but we create it unconsciously a lot of the time and therefore we project and have conflict and war and injustice. Working on your dreams and making them conscious shows you what you really are feeling, what is sabotaging your plans, as well as what you could become. The unconscious is extremely wise. But it speaks a different language. We must learn the language. It is universal. We all dream and dreams take us out of our reality to another reality. If we live to be 80 we’ll have spent 20 years dreaming. It only makes sense to try and make sense out of our dreams.   I have learned a process that reveals meaning rather than “interprets it.” It is experiental and emotional, and it works. I’m a poet. Everyone knows poets are crazy. No one pays them. We agonize over whether to put an “and” or a “but” for hours, days maybe and no one cares but us. But poetry, like life, contains ambiguity. And poetry resolves paradox; it holds the opposites in tension where they can produce a reconciling image. It’s the ultimate healer. It’s also greatly expressionistic of our most intense emotions. Poetry heals, especially its dark side, heals. We get to experience in the moment, which is where we need to be. It’s actually not that crazy, though mainstream people have no idea what it’s about. But when someone writes poetry, to be in the act of it, puts you totally in the moment and the unconscious delivers. it’s like channeling. One is given so much solace. Poetry is addictive, in a good way. And it has correspondences with dreaming, so it seems natural to me as I love imagery.

My most recent publication is a poetry collection, "Original Human," from Word Tech Press for which I received my fifth Pushcart Nomination. My spiritual memoir, and Amazon Best Seller, "The Future That Brought Her Here" from Nicholas Hays/Ibis Press reached #1 is Psychology and Social Sciences on Amazon.com in Sept 2009 and won an Honorable Mention at the Los Angeles Book Festival in 2013. I edited the anthology "Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology" from The University Press of New England, and in 2008 won the analytical essay award from Packingtown Review and The Santa Barbara Poetry Award, the first place award from Briar Cliff Review Poetry Competition in 2006 and Carpe Articulum’s first place in their 2010 Poetry Contest. In 2013 her short story “Come Alone” won The Carol Bly Short Story Competition and is featured on writersrisingup.com I was awarded a Poetry Fellowship in 1997 from the National Endowment for the Arts, William T. Foley Award from America, The Barbara Bradley Award from The New England Poetry Club, and a Special Mention from The Pushcart Prizes 1992. I am the author of "Where Divinity Begins" (Alice James Press) and four other chapbooks, "Inside Light" (2007) from Finishing Line Press, "Harmony of the Next" (2005) which won the Riverstone Chapbook Award, "Psyche Revisited" (1992), which won the Embers Magazine Chapbook Contest, and "Rainmakers" (Coyote Love Press ). I have received 6 Pushcart Prize nominations. My poems and reviews have been published in many anthologies and journals such as The North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Nimrod, The Journal, The Boston Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Runes and Orion among others. A Bread Loaf Scholar, a recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Centrum Foundation, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studios, I facilitate writing and dream image workshops in South Florida, and served as Poetry reviewer for The Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. I am a freelance editor working through thumbtack.com and my website intuitivegateways.com, and teache Creative Writing as an adjunct professor at Broward College.