Book News & Workshops

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,…

A few weeks ago a friend from western New York sent me a packet of autumn leaves from her woods. They were still soft, just fallen, red and orange and yellow and chartreuse, bright with banked fires. I wept. Until I moved east from California to live with my sweetheart in an old farmhouse in…