A beloved friend back in upstate New York just entered hospice a few weeks ago. She knew this was on the horizon. In early May, another friend and I visited with her at her home near the Finger Lakes National Forest…
Odes of Opposition: A Collaborative Poetry Project
A while back, a poetry pal and I worked a collaborative project we christened Odes of Opposition. We wanted to copy the hand of the masters, those poetic stars fixed into the contemporary, literary discourse…
Writing in Form: The Double-Block
Several months ago, I was playing around with a form invented by the poet Jericho Brown called the duplex. I decided to modify his duplex into a form of my own that I christened the “double-block.”…
Publication News: Raven Chronicles
My poem, “Gift Event for Our New Gilded Age” appeared in the Celebration Issue of Raven Chronicles, A Journal of Art, Literature & The Spoken Word, Vol. 22, July 2016…
Found Poem: “Genesis, American Style”
In March 2019, Halfway Down the Stairs published my found poem, “Genesis, American Style,” in their All That Glitters edition of their quarterly magazine. The editors noted that this issue was a way to “explore our never-ending resistible urge to pour ourselves out”…
Writing in Form: The Sestina
In Summer 2012, my poem, a sestina called “The Winter We Lived in the Church & It Snowed Daily & The First Barrel of Crude Oil Traveled Successfully Through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,” was published in the Security Issue of Blood Orange Review. A sestina is six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet…
Strolling Down Publication Memory Lane…
For years, my website was the place where I listed and linked to my publications along with writing awards and other projects I was working on. I had a few blogs that talked about the art and craft of writing, books I was reading, flowers I was growing, places I traveled…
From the Finger Lakes: A Memoir Anthology
“With this collection of memoir writing, both prose and poetry, Cayuga Lake Books presents our third anthology to feature creative work by authors who live in the Finger Lakes region of New York or have left without ever forgetting what this part of the country means to them…
Writing in Form: The Fib
Recently, I had some fun writing in a new-to-me poetry form called the fib. I am hardly a mathematics nerd—in fact radically far from it. But playing around with these constraints was actually fun. And I found it a useful way to uncover the gist and pith of a few old poems that needed significant revisiting and revising…
Retrospective News: Oregon Literary Fellowship
In December 2004, I was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship—specifically, the Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship for Literary Nonfiction. What an honor! Several months later, the 2004 class of recipients was fêted at a lovely ceremony at the Wieden + Kennedy offices…
