Dearest friends, I’ve got a fundraising campaign going for the next month–CBAW is trying to match a foundation grant. If you can help us out, or know someone who can, please consider passing the information along. Here’s a link to the campaign. With the help of the community, we can bring art, music, improv, and…
Read more
Saturday before last, a wonder-friend sent me this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. So many times, as we navigated the crowds and listened to the children speak and watched little kids holding signs that said, “I don’t want to be next,”at the March For Our Lives, I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude and sorrow and…
Read more
The writing of poetry has fallen behind the business of poetry lately, and while that’s sometimes how it has to be, I feel it like a crick in my neck. When you ignore the poems, they stop coming and I’m always afraid that I’ll have neglected them too long. But I tend to find my…
Read more
I have a friend on instagram who posts these lovely, sacred looking photos of her notebook ready to receive writing every morning. I look at them while I’m avoiding my own writing. Yesterday morning I was sitting on my bed with my laptop and stacks and journal and pen and the hood of my sweatshirt…
Read more
Recently a friend said to me, “You were just talking about how writing is what matters most to you and now you have another book coming out! How lucky!” Um. But it’s not luck. But also…it’s not just Hard. Work. either. I mean, of course it’s hard work, it just is automatic in a lot of ways.…
Read more
Last week was really busy and kind of brutal on my body and schedule and my housekeeping (honestly, by the weekend it looked like a tornado had hit this place, kind of gruesome–fortunately I’m capable of looking away from stove crumbs). So if I’m behind on replying to your poem or email, I’m sorry. The to-do…
Read more
Last Wednesday I woke to an email informing me that my beautiful, talented friend Terri S. Shrum passed away after a battle with cancer. She’d been diagnosed just weeks after she’d decided to pick up and move to Key West from New Orleans to devote herself to the craft of writing. I’d been reading the…
Read more
I ended up not leaving the recording of me reading the poem in because it was so damn quiet. Talking to myself is 100% in my practice, but I think I’ve trained myself not to do it too loudly, so I just get quieter as the video continues. But it’s closed captioned, so you can…
Read more
Monday I heard 4 spectacular poems in response to Brendan Constantine’s “The Needs of the Many,” and Brendan himself will join my groups Tuesday and Wednesday. And then AWP, the best/worst annual conference where all these people I love on the page and in person are in one place and there are so many books…
Read more
Some cool shit has been going down. Cool+Scary+Exhausting (like all the best things). And some magical dream stuff. I hope you’ll join us next week. We do lots of shows with the USO. I’ve done a fair number of readings out in the world. But these last few weeks working towards a more integrated single performance have…
Read more
