It’s completely unexpected but I am up way to late, ignoring my homework with my head in Riley’s lap and his smell all over my house. I can’t explain it except that in my mind all I can think is [...]
Vic and I go see Catherine McCall read from her memoir, Lifeguarding, at Malaprop’s in BigCity, NC. I have not read the book but recognize the author as soon as we walk in and make a b-line [...]
Tonight Eve’s Night Out is a platform of bravery. We are small group, just barely a dozen this time, but each reader is so honest and full of pitter-patter courage. I read my poems for [...]
The young man’s face is painfully pimpled and adolescent. He stands at the counter, a foot taller than his mother, as they disagree about whether or not he should eat a bagel. “After all that [...]
Moxa smoke curls around my left wrist and up my forearm in finger-like swirls. It is ancient mugwort, dried and rolled in China then shipped to the US to compliment acupuncture treatments. The [...]
I wake in pre-dawn darkness. The cicadas, finally, are asleep. I, however, am not. Which is why I cannot help but get out of bed and write the sentence that swirls around in my brain. It’s the [...]
It’s difficult to explain, really, except to just come out and say it: I went to a wedding and a funeral in the same weekend, at the same place, with the same people. Our community has lifted the [...]
“It’s a solo sport,” my advisor tells me about the writing life. This, in response to my observation that sometimes I feel near the edge of insanity. “It doesn’t get any easier,” another faculty [...]
Riley is more soft spoken over the phone; tender, almost. He’s depressed. New York was too hot. So hot he couldn’t think. So hot he rode the subway for free air-conditioning. So hot he forgot to [...]
Once writers put something on the page, the possibilities for a different way to say the same thing converge on the brain, barraging its cells with parts of speech in various tenses. In other [...]
