In California the state fiscal crisis has resulted in the scheduled closure of seventy state parks (25% of the total number) by July of 2012. The majority of the parks scheduled for closure are in Northern California where the poet Katherine Hastings lives. Hastings, who runs a well-respected reading series in Santa Rosa, CA, called …
I just finished reading a review of mine, published only recently though I wrote it quite some time ago. It surprised me. Why? Because it’s a pretty decent piece of writing, and I have absolutely no sense of being the person who wrote it. Okay, I know I wrote it—I remember working on it–and it’s …
Visiting My Daughter In Manhattan, October, 2001 A child’s laugh shatters the glass we call rue while a ruckus of sirens jams the neighborhoods. Everywhere we walk the wind frisks us, the brisk autumn air pats us down. -=- In a cramped noodle shop a whole roast pig blurs by, burnt velvet. The harried waiter …
I can’t remember how many years ago I first “met” Russ Thorburn (ten maybe?) but it was after I saw his ad for manuscript editing in Poets & Writers. At that time I had a collection I had loosely titled “Eden Street” and, after some emails back and forth, I decided to send him a …
Two days ago I was at a local coffee house replenishing our supply of dark roast. I placed the order and handed my empty bag to the young woman behind the counter. She handed it back to me a few minutes later; as she tapped the bag, then folded and smoothed the worn paper, we …
As soon as I came up with that title I realized I just can’t help myself—I am an ad man’s daughter after all; I come by the glib and the slick naturally. That said (and perhaps as a counter to the genetic link!), I also put my heart and soul into most of the works …
It’s a bright sunny January day and I’m cold—freezing actually—even though the frost on the lawn melted hours ago, wafting up in ghostly drifts—even though I’m wearing several layers of clothes, like Heidi when she arrived at her grandfather’s house in the Alps. The poet in me paces, turns the heat to 68 (a rare …
If you walked into my kitchen right now you’d see the cartoon I snipped from a December 2006 New Yorker posted on a cupboard door beside one of Snoopy typing away on the roof of his doghouse, and a photograph of our now not-so-new new president signing something into law. In the New Yorker cartoon …