Rivendell Writers’ Colony was magical in October. The main house is set on a bluff looking east over a long, often mist-filled valley. Each morning from my beautiful room I watched the sun rise over the valley and the mountains behind. During long Indian summer days I wrote in a hammock under huge oak trees,…
I leave for a residency at beautiful Rivendell Writers Colony (http://rivendellwriterscolony.org/) next week. Fall in the Smokies! After years in the lovely but seasonless tropics, to think of October in the woods! I wanted a residency in the mountains. My father’s people came from the Blue Ridge, and we grew up camping in the Sierras…
“Whale Fall,” “Reversing the Spell on Mauna Kea,” and “Minotaur,” three poems I read in the Poetry Flash reading series last February, have just been published in the Poetry Flash Literary Review. My thanks to Poetry Flash editor Joyce Jenkins for including me among poets I admire so much! And thanks to both Joyce Jenkins…
Sometimes, magically, one of those perfect readers you imagine when you write something is actually out there in the audience when you read. It happened last February at Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books in Berkeley. Cynthia Albers was in the audience that night, and later wrote a wonderful blog post about my work. But I…
Last month was National Poetry Writing Month – NaPoWriMo. I decided to commit myself to writing and posting a poem every day for 30 days. I joined a NaPoWriMo Facebook group of a dozen or so poets whose work I admire, and warned my family and friends that I would not be fit to live…
When a whale dies, it becomes whale fall. Its body, an immense ecosystem, sinks slowly to the ocean floor. But that ecosystem changes. First come ratfish, hagfish and sharks – mobile scavengers who smell flesh and swim in to feed. For years, sometimes, the vast world sinks. When it reaches bottom, new colonizers – worms,…