This is a message to all yous billionaires out there. You know who you are. If you want to buy my vote in a highly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice election, or […]
If You Want My Vote, It Will Cost You
Some Truth, A Rant, and Talking Back
Since the inauguration on January 20, 2025, following the news in the good, old U.S.A. is like having pins pushed into my voodoo doll brain. Please, stop torturing the nation, you horribly, […]
Gun Lovers, Quit Whining! You Are Winning the Weapons Race
On a sunny day this summer, floating in a swimming pool beneath an azure sky, the topic of guns came up. A man who is a friend and relative by marriage, let’s […]
Sometimes Nature Kills Us: A Book Review of “The Ghost Town Collectives and other stories of the Anthropocene”
The catastrophic events in Brittney Corrigan’s collection, The Ghost Town Collectives and other stories of the Anthropocene, could happen as soon as tomorrow, in a decade or three, or maybe yesterday. Rogue […]
The Joy of Voting, Then and Now
In the spring of 1979, I was enrolled in a Government Class required for graduation at Greenville High School. It was the Dazed and Confused era of teen life in Texas, and […]
Potatoes for the People, Free Palestine
I’m surprised when people ask the internet questions like: when does a potato go bad? I’m surprised because it seems like the kind of knowledge any adult American should possess. We’ve all […]
A Brief History of Associated Writing Programs Conferences
2002: New Orleans My first AWP was a road trip with other cream city review editors from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Creative Writing Program. We rented an entire house in New Orleans […]
Scammed and Spammed by Mystery Mail
When you live in an Age of Scams, it’s hard to know who or what to trust. Opening an email, or answering a phone call, or accepting a social media invite could […]
What If We Stayed Angry?
They designed the plague so women would be too exhausted for rage. Staying angry enough to act takes enormous reserves of both energy and desperation. Those are the first two sentences of […]
Comings and Goings in “Sometimes the Light”: A Book Review
Campbell, Rick, Sometimes the Light. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2022. If you’re a fan of travel narratives, I recommend the essays in Sometimes the Light by Rick Campbell, a […]
The Gloria Sirens 