Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today is my last full day at the writer’s retreat, and I’m sad to be leaving. I worked hard, got abundant and extraordinary feedback from P., and pushed Madwoman to another level. I have the vast majority of what I will need for this book roughly together, although I remain open to its continued growthContinue reading “Clear Water”

The snow’s been coming down for a while but the ATV was dead for a bit until B. came up and replaced the battery for me. Don’t know if it was me or K., but someone left the ignition on and absolutely killed the battery. These small ones don’t last long in single-digit temps, itContinue reading “Endings”

A young worker, iPod deaf to the dawn, saws at the deadened banana fronds, alone in his Winston-scented world. Warming air soughs and whispers the branches in growing bright as invisible birds chip and chirp and the asparagus fern twitches beneath the fitful movements of a miniature lizard. I could be in Mytilene or CyprusContinue reading “Long Beach”

I see myself in the interactions from my family and recognize that same fear and dysfunction that have marked so much of my behavior. It is good, healthy, for me to stop jumping each time they push the buttons, and it is encouraging to see clearly the destructive behaviors I learned in that collective. BUTContinue reading “Stasis”

I am beguiled and attracted by the remote, the unfamiliar, the different. I yearn for the places I have not been, not as a fickle tourist or outsider but as someone who inhabits them, not as a dilettante sampling or an occupier oppressing, but as a seeker of the sources of my being, of pathsContinue reading “My Orientalism”

The place was rustic and comfortable, if buggy. An electric paddle fan stirred the air from the apex of the sloped octagonal ceiling. A large stone fireplace opposite the old maple bed with its cotton comforter printed with meadowlarks and orioles and mocking birds. Decades-old knotty pine paneling. Well-worn armchairs and scuffed tables of hand-me-downsContinue reading “Residency”

I remember the house in Mendham where one summer day it poured on one side and did not rain on the other, and my brother Peter picked the crabapples off the tree in the front yard on the rainy side and threw them at me, and they were hard as rocks and they hurt. IContinue reading “Seeing Red”

I fear I’m a dabbler. I look around at all the PhDs I know who all settled long ago into their field, and focus, and research stream. They keep turning that same plot in that same field, digging it deeper and deeper, breaking up clods and clay, adding nutrients and soil amendments, organic matter andContinue reading “Leaden”

Lilies shading from white to deep burnt orange adorn the feet of the cherry trees, whose leaf litter and falling fruit demand daily attention. The cherries hang in dark fistfuls along the lengths of branches weighted to the ground. A lone squirrel stares silently from his perch then grabs a cherry and eats it likeContinue reading “Illicit Pleasures”

The only connection among the dozen or so of us, the only sinew that ties us in any obvious way, has nothing to do with writing, the purpose for this gathering. It is critters that connect us. Each and every one of us has at least one varmint visitor in the quarters set aside forContinue reading “Residents”