When I think about talking to strangers, I think of two coffee shop conversations. One included a private rap concert, the other was an impassioned description of building designs with an aspiring architect.

He asked if he could show me something. I said, “Sure.” And this is when the private rap concert in the Cornelius […]

I have students who have pet bobcats, who love celery, who adore brushing their teeth, who like to get in car wrecks. I have students who won’t eat hot dogs, and students who will eat crickets. I have students who have two colored eyes, and students who own two goats – one that faints, and […]

Am I ready?

I just drove into town as four log trucks rolled out.

I have my slide rule, gold pan, blank canvas, International Pathfinder 8000 8-Band Radio, and my baseball bat. I’m as ready as I get.

Read in the New York Times Book Review yesterday that Nicholson Baker just wrote a (nearly 800 […]

I appreciate first day of class speeches. It’s a genre of its own. I am beginning my tenth year as a high school teacher this Monday. Some of my classes will hear a version of this:

On Poems and Pull-Ups

I am a poet not a United States Marine. I believe that the body and […]

The topics stack up. I appreciate books and conversations and sermons and relatives and all kinds of small things that have crossed my sensory pathways. Trying to photograph squirrels to send to my sister, and also having the Silly Putty stuck at the bottom of my daughter’s hair and not the top.

Sentence fragments. […]

This is not a systematic review or commentary of A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. It is a meandering meditation and collage of notes and thoughts on criticism after reading Scott’s book.

The following two sentences I will use and think about as a writer for […]

The whole book was great, but Chapter 3 made me dizzy. I’ll admit that it could have been caffeine, but when I finished reading Chapter 3 of Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl I felt dizzy, giddy, and inspired. It’s a great chapter, and a great book.

This is the first paragraph of Chapter 3 of […]