2 February 2020 I need to sit here and write myself back to where I started…. It’s not enough to poke around with pen and paper and stare out the icy window. I need to down the coffee and dig in. Prod the earth beneath the life I say I’ve lived. I need to mine … Continue reading The Deepest Pocket of Forest or Finding the Start of a Story →

8 November 2019 I’ve been in Montana four years now. Up here with May snowstorms and November elk hunts. Up here a thousand or more miles from family member or old friend. While everything I have here is still new to me, what lasts and what changes is the history of who I am, who … Continue reading Absence Makes the Heart Grow →

11 October 2019 Pilgrim. The word implies desperation. It means: devotee, traveler, wayfarer and believer. It means: one who abandons the past in hopes of something new, something special. I first sponged up Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because the whole thing—in its way—“takes place” in Virginia, in a pocket of my once-upon-a-time home-place. … Continue reading Annie’s Creek and My Virginia →

19 April 2019 I don't write poems about being lost at sea, and I don't write poems about Paris, but I've always thought, if I ever make it to Europe, I'd go by boat. This, of course, is completely unpractical. But it speaks to something in me. The need for the nostalgic, some nod to … Continue reading Writing Myself Through a Drive →

2 April 2019: I want a page to sum up this season. I want a page to collect a bit of this time, this year. I want a page to hold something of my world today. Instead, I read Lucie Brock-Broido and Deborah Tall and drink coffee before work while first light falls over my … Continue reading To Let the Ever-Rare Go Unseen →

19 November 2018: I read Carl Phillips with a cup of French Press coffee this morning. I note his poem, “Revolver,” for its strong, brief musicality—scribbling blue ink in the margins. A short poem, half a page and slender, it moves a long in its inevitable way. And by inevitable, I mean natural. I mean—of … Continue reading Keeping the Season Within a Frame →

27 August 2018: I take a walk a cold Monday night in August. Yes, this is Montana and it’s been raining all day, the thermometer hovering around 50. Grey and puffy, the sky has been quiet through the whole performance. A silent film. The pause between stanzas. The turning of a page. And I have … Continue reading Beyond the Window →

13 August 2018: So it’s Sunday and we smell the smoke of other places, the whole town and all the mountains wearing a strange, yellow haze of smoke and sun. I stare at my chapbook manuscript before I send it off for a friend to have a look. I’m not sure what’s happening with it—as … Continue reading A Million Things in Plain Sight →

6 August 2018: I used to read Donald Hall years ago, after college, in a different time and place, and now he’s dead, and it’s fine enough I be the one to tell you. Aging is nothing like the seasons gathering on his farm. A different mode, a different time. I can’t ripple the same … Continue reading A Second Affirmation →

23 July 2018: Today I came home from work and wrote in Sharpie the word sonder* on the calendar above my desk. Odd. Why do that? Because I heard it used earlier. Because I heard it used earlier and want to remember it. Because I want to remember what it means. Because it means a … Continue reading The Word Sonder →