We have become custodians of a wonderful variety of hard neck garlic called Ellensburg Blue. It was back around 2018 when we first ordered some from Irish Eyes, a family farm outside Ellensburg, Washington. I remember we tried it alongside their Inchelium Red variety and there was no comparison…
Hitting the Honorable Mention Jackpot
In the Spring 2023 Oregon Poetry Association poetry contests, I got three honorable mentions for some of my newer poems. Now to find publication homes for them! Here’s the skinny: Honorable Mention for “Of the Wild Bees Living in a Tree in the Alley” in the Wildlife Themed Category…
Neighborhood Poet!
My poem, “Record-breaking Winter Storm Tableau,” was featured in the April 2023 edition of Concordia News, the monthly neighborhood newsletter. A PDF version of the newsletter is here: concordiapdx.org/concordia-news/concordia-news-downloads. The italicized lines in this poem are from Emily Dickinson’s….
Playing with Form: The Cento
Two centos from my manuscript, I Am Speechless, have been selected for publication in We Dissent. We Resist. We Persist: An Anthology of Our Human Rights to be published by Flower Song Press in 2023. “The Poem of Your Body” was written after the May 2022 leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion….
Retrospective News: James Jones First Novel Fellowship
When I went to graduate school at SUNY/Binghamton in the early 1990s, my major was English and Creative Writing. My creative writing concentration at the time was fiction—not the poetry I have been writing for the past fifteen years…
Secrets and Dreams…
In 2016, three of my poems, “Elegy for the Lifelong Incunabulist,” “One More Attempt to Set the Record Straight about the Breaking Out/Away/Off/Up/Down,” and “Voyage in …
Reading Out Loud…
Below is the list of various readings and panels I have been a part of over the years. Sad to note how many of these venues—particularly brick-and-mortar bookstores—are now gone…
A Humble Curbside Memorial
I first stumbled on this small portrait of George Floyd in September 2020, after the upheavals of the Portland pandemic summer/protest summer. It sat by its lonesome on a curb in the Woodlawn neighborhood here in Northeast Portland, making a quiet statement (I thought) every time I walked past…
Publication News: “How I Wasted My Life“
So many of us look back, take stock, try to evaluate just what we have spent our days on in the living of this life. This has been a fertile subject for poetry for ages as well. In Summer 2015, VoiceCatcher published my poem, “How I Wasted My Life“ …
Confessional Poetry…
It is not my style to openly confess my sins—of which I am fully aware there are plenty and then some and perennially good at …