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 …
Streams of Consciousness
Rivers I Have Known
Historic —
Susquehanna: River of origin, is there such a thing as a birth river, the river in the town where I grew up, the one that flooded the streets and left us homeless for a time, that summer before my high school senior year….
One-A-Day: Poetry as Creative Vitamin
Since last fall, maybe early November, I’ve been drafting (mostly) a poem a day with time off for Thanksgiving, a 60th birthday party, Christmas, and our recent delirious spate of February spring. I’d long meant to tackle such a project…
Cat’s Cradle
As the whole world likely knows, the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, died at the age of ninety-one last week. I was royally hooked on everything written by Salinger when I was an impressionable teen. Franny and Zooey was my favorite…
Form not Formlessness
One of my resolutions for 2010 is to jump-start what I’ve taken to calling my solo MFA regimen. I know I have many gaps to fill, knowledge-wise…
Deconstructing Rejection
They’ve started to trickle in: the not-unexpected rejection letters from the dozen or so contests I entered a few months back, inevitably telling me that my poetry manuscript has not been selected for a prize or for publication
To Leap Is to Fly
I recently returned to writing poetry after years in the prose wilderness, writing short stories and the inevitable attempt-at-novel. While I’d never abandoned the reading poems—a love from way back when—in graduate school, my workshops and classes were focused around the craft of fiction. Oh, I waded into the…
