Once upon a time I read fairy tales. Once upon a time I read a slightly subversive Victorian lady fairy tale to a virtual audience of about ten. We were all in little digital Zoom boxes, but outside of the boxes we were inside of homes.
I was offered two goblets. I chose the smaller, luminous one.
I pitched something to Lit Hub and they took it. A dream. But bittersweet. Because it’s for Eavan Boland. It’s about motherhood, and middle age, and passion and confusion and regret. So it’s also for all mothers who have art stirring, and waiting, inside them. Go be you. I know it feels hard. But do…
I do not work in higher education. I work as a mother. I work as a poet. I work part-time as a copyeditor. I work on my children’s school board, as a political activist, and for my rural, collectively-owned community. All those things are work. But because of the society in which we live,…
Things can be crappy (you want a better word but that’s really how it feels) — crappy, top-of-the-line, end-of-the-line crappy, nothing the way it’s supposed to be, including your feeling of dissatisfaction with words, and then you just go, you go out alone into the dark night and walk up the road and the air…
Let’s make him fly, says Milo, about his foam board Santa hitched to tottering, prop-legged reindeer when we get out the Christmas decorations. And I believe him. I believe in him. I have to. Because more people were gunned down today. People who help people were gunned down today. So sweet five-year-old boy, I will…
Because I am finding my way through this fear of routine massacres in America. Because it is so mysterious to me to raise a son. Because I really have strong feelings about guns— here’s a poem: ON REMAINING NEUTRAL WHILE YOUR FIVE-YEAR-OLD HANDLES A GUN It takes practice. It must, to find just the…
I spent the weekend raging. Beginning on Friday night, glued to the links I’d followed from Facebook about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I raged against the simplicity of media analysis, raged against hatred, and then, at midnight, sitting up in bed, I raged against my husband for not “getting” politics and race in precisely the…
Yesterday, after my husband and I woke to the sound of our children giggling in their bedroom, but before they came and crawled into bed with us, I turned to him and asked, “What are you thankful for?” He answered, “Pretty much the whole thing.” So there you go. Thank you, whole thing. I guess…
A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…