Several years back, in the pre-pandemic Before Times, I had the good fortune to work with Dana Levin, a talented poet and extraordinary teacher, during several July sessions I attended at the Port Townsend Writers Conference…
Publication News: Fragments in qaartsiluni
Qarrtsiluni published my poem, “I started near the far north. Ran.” in their Fragments issue back in 2012. Their call for submissions requested “in the wild” creations more than overly crafted pieces so that’s what I sent in!
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End of the Season…
There is a spectacularly bright full moon out there on this chilly, late November night. Yesterday, I cut the final dahlias blooms of the season. They were looking a little ragged after a few nights of just-around-freezing temperatures and cold wind. Then I tackled the plants with my new, awesome Felco secateurs—they made swift work of stems and stalks
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Studying the Masters
When you are someone who writes or aspires to write, I think reading means not just enjoyment but also study. It means seeking to understand all the nuts and bolts about the way a piece of writing is put together and then ticks…
The Last Bouquet?
There was a frost last week in and around the Northeast Portland neighborhood where we live, a couple of miles up the hill from the Columbia River. But somehow the dahlias survived here in our micro-climate that only got to a low of 33 degrees F. I walked by other gardens where their dahlia leaves are now blackened, their unspent blooms still knobby and unopened on their stems…
Publication News: “Transubstantiation”
I can’t remember how I came up with the title of this poem. Perhaps I wanted to invoke the notion in Christian theology about the conversion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ into homely bread and wine. In a poem about suicide—specifically death by hanging—why would I have dared to invoke the Eucharist at all…
B-I-N-G-O!
Often the wisdom arrives in the simplest of packages and seems like it was there (and obvious) all along
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Leave the Leaves
Our garden helper, Phil, was here today, pruning the vine maples, the Japanese maples, the witch hazel, the redbud
I Come From…
Here is a simple prompt that can be useful for generating lots of specific detail—memories, images, family history—that can then be mined for creative writing work. I made this list a while back, oh maybe in 2005. Maybe it’s time for me to revisit this prompt again!…
Every Picture Tells A Story
I am not a natural with all this digital photography. I generally like/prefer/privilege physical media—paper books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, printed photographs. But hell, the damn iPhone camera is (even when it is not the latest version) an awesome tool and I use it regularly and widely to record my adventures rambling through the days called living this life…
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