Navigation through the fog — I define myself by my creativity. I’m a writer, a poet, a printmaker, and a painter. I dabble in oil pastels. I hang out in libraries and art galleries. I’m an artist, first and foremost. Art is more than a pastime: it’s central to my identity. My friends are artists…

February is for lovers, as the shortest and coldest month — There was a time when I fell in love with anyone who fell in love with me. I was a black hole of love, a succubus of dreaming, a longing for longing itself. Afterwards I suffered the let-down, the end to the small story, abruptly or over long languid time …

And ours, by extension — I read an article recently in the NYT about China and its aging population, low birth rate, and slowing economic growth. The article’s point of view is that these are bad signs for China. …

Is not fall —

The importance of good old-fashioned rumination — The project that won’t die I have an old novel that I’ve pulled out and worked on for so long that it is a patchwork of points of view, wild plot twists, and first and third person narrators. …

Food, babies, and outer space — Sometimes I can think of no better place than a floating half-dream the moment before sleep. Like good company around a table a groaning board of harvest friends whose cleverness tends toward laughter toward companionship, belonging. I love this world, I do, I ache with desire, with terrible suffering, with…

Retaining optimism while aging — One of the more surprising and bewildering side-effects of growing older is losing a sense of belonging to the world. Amend that: it’s a sense of being important in the world, important TO the world. In many ways this comes as a relief, at least to me. I felt the…

Reports of its death are wildly overreported I dream poetry, the tallest cliff as I fly, the monster chasing me through impossible terrain. Poetry is seven beautiful birds lined up to tell my secrets, one by one. She is a demon of elusive elision, that spark disappearing even as she…

All I ask of the new year is long stretches of languid time strangers performing feats of compassion unity, peace, justice. Tall orders for this complicated world, cracked sideways and cruel as it can be, where despite it all, it is inflamed by love, love leaking through permeating the ugly…