Happy (almost) New Year! I hope that whoever is reading this has been able to find some rest and relaxation this holiday season. It’s been quite a year in terms of politics, politically-charged vigilante violence, a continued refusal (by some) to turn around this thing called global warming, crises large and small around the world,… Read More What I Published This Year: A 2019 Scrapbook
Writer, storyteller, and educator Kate O’Brien Wooddell recently published her first collection, Beasts, through Florida’s Happy Tapir Press. Beasts is a compendium of poems, flash memoir, and even a couple of pieces that verge into surrealism and magic. Beasts covers familial, often politicized themes like motherhood and daughterhood, sexual abuse, travel, memory, and reconciliation, all… Read More “My True Story”: An Interview with Kate O’Brien Wooddell
It’s nearly the end of August, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what happened this summer. This post is more for my own records than anything else. I’m not sure how wide the audience is for this type of post, but what’s a blog for anyway? A blog’s a… Read More Summer Send-Off
Okay, so we’re almost two months into 2019. What’s been going on in the world of this blog? 2019: What’s happening? Savoring new publications written by friends If you like fairy tales, philosophy, and the fantastic, Jonathan Duckworth’s chapbook Book of Never is well worth your time. Copies of other friends’ books are on their way: Chloe… Read More What, Oh What to Read and Write in 2019
This semester, I have started teaching a writing and rhetoric class (thrilling! surprising! edifying! terrifying!) to first-year college students at my university. Though we aren’t writing poems in the class, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on my own poetry writing process because no matter what genre you’re writing in, all writing has something in… Read More 13 Ways to Revise a Poem
I’ve been having conversations recently about voice and audience, social media and readership, work and attention. As writers, how do we find good homes for our writing? Is a platform “better” if there are more readers? Is it wrong to want additional readers? What about the moral issues we have with social media? We’re “supposed… Read More Links I Like: August 2018 Edition
Right now, I should be writing…something else. I am trying to finish up two book reviews today. I need to scale down many, many pages of notes. I should be planning the class I’m supposed to start teaching later this month. Should be reading the stack of books I’m trying to finish before the summer… Read More Oh, Buoyant Group of Artist-Friends
A few years ago, my friend Bethany Price started holding an itinerant writing group in coffee shops in Milwaukee. The group was fun because we wrote, but it was also great because Bethany assembled a different collection of weirdos each time. You always knew you would meet interesting people. A few years later, one of… Read More Micro-Reviews of New VegAl Poetry: Jarrott, Thompson & La Force
One morning earlier this week, I woke up early, had time to snooze, and thus ended up lying in bed typing a weirdo pseudo-mini-essay Facebook post on my phone about dead raccoons, the perils of Miami traffic, performance art, and my ambivalence toward social media. Every time I post something on Facebook, I get an… Read More Poets & Activists & the Social Media Backdrop
I’m thinking about beginning to frame these Links & Politics posts to focus on the ways that people are using language in the service of social justice. I have also started making a running list of the resistance anthologies that have been published since the November 2016 election. There will be a blog post to… Read More Links & Politics: July 2018 Edition, Part 2
