Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren’t a Poet

Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life is part personal journey, part life-coaching for poets (or those who’d like to live like one), part creativity guide, and part reference, with a special section on the modern history of the Chicago poetry scene, including the birth of the poetry slam. In many ways, this book is an anti-MFA guide to being a poet - or any other type of creative person. As poet Robert Frost said,
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Some of Gallaher’s more personal sections of the book trace dating a well-known underground comics artist - dinner at a Denny’s restaurant with an Academy Award Best Actor – seeing a UFO in central Wisconsin - a night when poet and men’s movement icon Robert Bly was tarred & feathered at a poetry reading – play rehearsals at David Mamet’s Chicago theater featuring then-unknown actor William H. Macy - how she met her poet husband, Carlos – reflections on Gallaher’s family relative, artist and member of the Algonquin Round Table, Neysa McMein – visits and stays at a variety of writers’ colonies around the country – and celebrating how friend Sandra Cisneros launched an international literary career starting with a little eight-poem chapbook at a humble bookstore in a Chicago Puerto Rican neighborhood.