Week One February 1- February 6

Week One 

February 3, 2015 

Writing bulk emails to awesome, published poets far beyond my league turned out to be more intimidating than anticipated. I had never been tasked with  emailing people a press release type of document before--I had never even emailed strangers before, and here I was, emailing a list of over 7,000 people; 7,000 strangers.

Gerry requested that I email members of Poets at Work regarding the first annual writer's retreat hosted by Poets at Work to Tuscany, Italy. I had to research the trip, the destination, and find quality pictures to include in the email. In total, I took three days to do this. Not because I procrastinated, but because I took my time to ensure a professional, well researched, clear, and concise email. I finally sent the draft on Sunday, February 1st.

On Monday, February 2nd, after I sent the draft email to Gerry, I had to download an Excel workbook with 87 contacts recorded in it, and cross-reference the contacts in the workbook with those on the Constant Contact website used by Poets at Work to send out emails. Unfortunately, there were only 27 contacts on the website. Needless to say, it took a fair amount of time to cross reference the databases.

On Tuesday, February 3rd, I sent out a created document with the poem of the week to all contacts in our database. The poem was a sample tantra from Harryette Mullen's recently published work, Urban Tumbleweed. The collection follows her life for a year and a day. She wrote a three line tantra every day for this period regarding her surroundings and thoughts.