My daughter, a veterinarian, has had a wide range of experiences with animals–working at an equid center in Morocco and on a sheep farm in Scotland, observing the feeding habits of platypuses…

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and c…

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borro…

Some days, this, from Bruce Springsteen… I was tryin’ to find my way homeBut all I heard was a droneBouncing off a satelliteCrushin’ the last lone American nightThis is radio nowh…

“ellipsis(n.) 1560s, “an ellipse” in geometry, from Latin ellipsis, from Greek elleipsis “a falling short, defect, ellipse in grammar,” noun of action from elleipein &…

Gleam Issue 11 The following poems were selected by the editors for Issue 11 of Gleam: Singing the Earth Song, by Rose Mary BoehmWhen it is Today, by Jamey BoelhowerAnother thing to Aware, by Kate …

Late summer, and this year the tomato hornworms are out in force. I have mixed feelings about these creatures, because once they hatch into hawk or sphinx moths, they are wonderful pollinators for …

July was a tough month and August is busy, so I won’t be reading 31 poetry books for the Sealey Challenge this year. I have managed to read two lovely collections from Jacar Press, however, t…

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of C…

When I start on a project, process, garden, or trip, I tend to think of it as an endeavor. I have my own understanding of the word, but I thought it might be wise to see what its background is. Acc…

Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then …

When I was a second-grader in Yonkers, NY, our school took us on a class trip to an art museum in New York City. I could not tell you which art museum it was (possibly the Whitney, possibly MoMA), …

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere, including Substack.

Ah, summer. Historically, not the best season for writing as far as I am concerned. The garden, yard, and outdoor activities tend to take precedence over sitting with a notebook or in front of a sc…

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes: “…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that…

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but…

I’ve been thinking about creativity in the sense of inventiveness, spurred by two recent visits to two very different places. The first place is the Hagley Museum, an industrial museum, site …