I’ve been reorganizing my poetry bookshelves, as one does during a pandemic, slowly sorting through books I’ve collected over the past thirty years. Most I sort by last name, slotting Barbara Ras […]
The Love of Poetry
Flash Nonfiction “His Apple Pie”–a dog, a pie, a bad guy
I’m proud and happy to announce my flash nonfiction essay, “His Apple Pie,” about a border collie and a bad guy, appeared today in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For […]
Creativity During Crisis or Five Reasons I Need Tim Gunn More Than Ever
I’m having a creative crisis along with the stress of the global pandemic outside my door and the uncertainty of life when we emerge. I’m trying to take the ‘extra’ time I […]
A Must Read Essay
The author of the essay “Whatever Happened to ________?” published anonymously, because she had to. Stalked by an ex-husband who freaked out due to her greater success as a writer, she has […]
Poetry Chain Letter
I’ve recently been the recipient of a handful of chain email plans, all with one idea: share quotes from poems that have been meaningful, inspiring, or comforting to you. The details of […]
Found Poetry
it’s funny how you go out and find poetry when you’re not even looking for it you’re just living and breathing and hearing and reading and it forms like the skin on […]
Literary Foremothers: EBS and Me
The nineteenth-century writer Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard (called affectionately EBS by her admirers) is one of my literary foremothers and a favorite among those I claim. Her first novel, The Morgesons, published in […]
Let’s School Together
I’m always sure it can’t be real when something good happens for me, especially something having to do with my career. So when my poem appeared on Verse Daily on April 1, […]
A Short Interview with Christi Clancy
Recently, my friend Christi Clancy, an amazing writer and Assistant Visiting Professor of English at Beloit College, has accepted a two-book publishing deal with St Martin’s publishing house, a well-deserved accomplishment that’s […]
On the Writing Process
I don’t believe there is a strategy that guarantees success, and the things we are so often told to do—because successful writers do them—may not be universal. That is, we think they’re successful strategies because successful writers engage in them, but what if they just work particularly well for those particular writers? What if our own individual processes must be designed specifically for us, an extension of who we are and also a creation of our own weird and wondrous imaginations?
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The Gloria Sirens 