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,…
“It is distressing, baffling, confusing, but the fact must be faced; there is no certainty in heaven above or on earth below.” – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Virginia Woolf was right. Of course. But it’s what we say in Zen, too. And at Pacific Zen Institute, we have started an online magazine of Zen and…
It’s been a wild autumn. I was picking up speed here, posting about Barbuda and Puerto Rico, and a poem in response to Las Vegas, and then…silence. The reason for my silence was fire. I live in Santa Rosa, which was the city hardest hit by the Northern California fires in October. I was rendered…
I want to write a poem about silence just like almost every other poet ever probably and am of course twisted up immediately in words but here is why I want to write a poem about silence silencers all sorts of silencers metal ones and flesh ones and metal ones that cut flesh with their…
Dear Rebecca, Maybe you already know this: When I was in my late 20s and in graduate school at Stanford, you came to give a talk about the American West. I think it was right before you published River of Shadows, your book on Eadward Muybridge and the technological west. I approached you afterwards. I told…
On Monday evening, which happened to be the evening of my 43rd birthday, my husband came home with the mail and dropped it on the desk as usual. And it was the usual pile of bills and holiday catalogs and appeals for end-of-year donations. And the Princeton Alumni Weekly. For years, when this magazine…
My poem “Horse Dreams” was accepted, and published online this past Friday, by Vine Leaves Literary Journal. This was my first published poem. Last week, I made a not-so-subtle celebratory fuss about it here. Why the hoopla? you might ask. It was a 4-line poem, and thousands of people publish poems. What’s the big deal?…
I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. See? It’s still true!…
I have a new love. It’s called poetry. I have an old love. It’s called poetry, too. They are finally meeting one another, in the space of my mind. While cleaning out my computer several months ago, I found a rich text file that held just one poem, with no attribution or signature. I honestly…
Yesterday my parents and I accompanied my daughter’s class on a field trip to San Francisco. The school rented a small tourist bus for the trip. As I climbed aboard and took my seat alone by the window (my daughter wanted to sit with her friends in the very, very back, and my parents wanted…