I received verification that my email subscribers have been successfully transfered to substack. I want to thank you in advance for continuing to read! (Please check your spam filter if you don’t get a post […] | Continue reading
I apologize to anyone who thinks the substack registration is a pain (it’s still free, btw), but I am moving there. I like the note and chat features and believe it might be more social than … | Continue reading
Yesterday I charged my dead reMarkable. I am ready to write poetry again, despite the chemo-induced fog I’m still experiencing. A person can find meaning in fog. It can be very soothing actually, fog filling the little depressions in the landscape. Depression is the actual scient … | Continue reading
4 am my time and zooming with the other west coast: a table reading with amazing people willing to give three hours of their time, energy and trust to someone who hasn’t had a staged production for adults in over twenty years. More than a little overwhelmed with appreciation. But … | Continue reading
Basically copy/paste from Facebook: Since leaving Twitter last year, I have been thinking about my experiments the last few years with social media, the “show your work” approach to publishing, online networking, “gigging”, vispo, and writing… And recently I’ve come to consider h … | Continue reading
Mid-flow, everything screeches to a halt. Mid-pentameter “doth” and I am thinking, what the Hell am I doing? Sacrilege to mess with Shakespeare. Where do I get off? How do I marry the archaic language to a heightened, but accessible language? And then there is the fact that my li … | Continue reading
I’m still circling around the problem of the letters. Information flies distances in breathtaking speed in Shakespeare’s time. All these letters. I am wondering how far from Shakespeare I want to go – not in terms of time (the brief is specific on keeping the time period as is – … | Continue reading
Regarding the AI discussions I have been reading online: I honestly believe our brains do nothing but reorganize the stories and perspectives we absorb in our lifetimes. There is nothing new, nothing falls from the moon onto our pages. Very much like AI, that will not spit out th … | Continue reading
I watched the Bristol Old Vic Theatre’s streaming of Complicité’s production Drive the Plow over the Bones of the Dead last night. Based on the novel by Olga Tocarczok. I fell in love with theater all over again. Kathryn Hunter is remarkable. And the physicality of the cast of te … | Continue reading
I am curious how people manage to keep parallel projects going. How to keep interest in something when you aren’t actually obsessed. There are stories I keep returning to. That lie in the back of my mind waiting to be picked-up and made real. I am afraid of many of them. Like Doc … | Continue reading
(I wasn’t sure this belonged in the process journal. But it does.) The rise of AI artworks makes me sad and a little freaked out about the future. I figure we’ll adjust and somehow find our humanity in this – or adjust to the (potential) truth that everything we do in our brains, … | Continue reading
Verse daily featured a poem I didn’t want to like. The diction, I guess. Might have been the form itself. A poem a day is a reminder to slow down. Morning coffee, dates and the blackbirds’ singing in the dark. Saturday. The final weekend before the students’ premiere, I have a fe … | Continue reading
Last night I watched a new play that is streaming on National Theatre at Home. Salomé. A visually and audibly stunning, code-switching performance with Arabic, Hebrew and English. The story is told with repeating poetic text and some dialogue – a retrospective narrated by “namele … | Continue reading
Hook, Plot 1, Pinch 1, Midpoint, Pinch 2, Plot 2, Resolve.Start with Plot 2, Hook, Midpoint. Fill in the gaps. An little exercise in storytelling. What do you do when the hook is what hooks you as a writer? And the Plot 2 point seems almost irrelevant in your own involvement with … | Continue reading
I have a wonderful friend who has had a radio program for years. She used to send me tapes of her programs, now digital files – always a theme. My favorite was Kids. It was on a cassette that we played in the car on road trips until it wore out in a long celebratory […] | Continue reading
Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, You cataracts and hurricanoes. Act 3, Scene 2 There was a television show a very long time ago that traced random connections from one thing to another. I think it was a BBC production, but it could have been NRK. My memory code swit … | Continue reading
The lapwings are here, with their pterodactyl claws. And I am shredded. Not in a good way, but worn very thin and strained to the point of snapping here and there. But not entirely. What do you do when the good news and the bad news falls into your basket at once? It is very […] | Continue reading
We can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language […] Ursula K. Le Guin The Marginalian has got to be the most seductive rabbit hole on the internet. Continuing the quote I found there – out of context: “One reflects the other. A lot of people are getti … | Continue reading
It is so much safer not to want. I think it is a fascinating theme when it’s not about romantic or sexual desires. When it’s not tragedy in the Greek sense. When it’s not the trope of the supporting role who we discover late had so much promise and gave it all up for some […] | Continue reading
Poems about disability. Poems about mental health and about mental disorders. It’s easy to conflate the last two. I sometimes have to remind myself I wrote an entire collection about what is it to experience mixed states of mania and depression. That’s how exceptional those month … | Continue reading
I’ve still been spending time with Lear this weekend. With Shakespeare’s language and the rich stories. And I am chastising myself for the arrogance in wondering… why is so much left unsaid? An example: Edgar – as Poor Tom – meets Gloucester and hears his father say that if he co … | Continue reading
Last night I had an idea for a play. And I told myself it was fine – that I would remember in the morning. We all know how that goes. And now it is gone. I’ve been listening to radio theater and it is interesting to notice the playwright’s creative daisy chain. I would like […] | Continue reading
That film clip sticks in my head. It’s from the 1970s – seems they did an awful lot of odd experiments on kids then – and it involved puppets. The kids would giggle and enjoy watching one of two puppets get their heads bashed over and over. They would have empathy for the other p … | Continue reading
I am reading a short story collection put out by the Bell Press. It is a collection of stories, and a companion response story. It is a familiar concept, but I guess I think of it in terms of a workshop exercise. That’s bizarre, considering my belief about what writing really is … | Continue reading
I am still brainstorming a project that may or may not pan out. There’s a concern though regarding the commissioned work: that the adaptation will inadvertently put a group of people already too often villainised in a bad light. And last night before falling asleep, I was having … | Continue reading
I have been listening to radio theater the past few days. It’s a medium that I haven’t much experience with. I wrote a short radio play in verse years ago about a women and her father who had Alzheimer’s. Waltzing in Present Tense. It won a competition as was supposed to be produ … | Continue reading
I am casually continuing to read Arne Naess and still sorting through what he really means, and what I really believe. “Ecosophies are not platforms for a political movement or policies, but are personal philosophies of life in a worldview.” He goes on to say that this internatio … | Continue reading
I still find myself turning to non-fiction for poetry. Bill Bryson explaining how the Appalachian mountains were formed and keep forming seems somehow more to the heart of poetry than a lot of what I’m finding in the anthologies I take to bed. I keep wondering if this has somethi … | Continue reading
GLOUCESTER: Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house, charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him. EDMUND … | Continue reading
“To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others dro… | Continue reading
I think that I have always had a bit of an aversion to the nature poems that hold up the prettiness of nature like an anecdote to all that hurts. They feel like lies. Imagine lying on the grass, looking up at a blue sky. How can you not put yourself in that space without […] | Continue reading
The unread and read-but-unsavored books on my shelves overwhelm me with choices. Matthea Harvey, I read for the line-breaks. Marianne Moore for the imagery. Robert Hass, to follow the evolution of a single poem through publications. I haven’t counted, but I fear books about poetr … | Continue reading
These introspection pages began with a virtual Camino during the lock-down. My formal participation in the group didn’t end well. The host didn’t believe that alternative perspectives were admissible in discussions. I disagreed with her declaration that no one could disagree with … | Continue reading
I cooked last night. Salted cod, kale, mashed cauliflower, roasted beets and garlic. I made dukkah, and feta cream-cheese with lemon zest. After nearly a week of feeling ill, this was good. After literally years of not enjoying cooking, not being creative in the kitchen: this is … | Continue reading
Every Brilliant Thing is categorized as a documentary. It’s actually a filmed stage production based on a book. A memoir. It touches on bipolar disorder and suicide. (Well, it points to it at any rate.) The film is streaming on HBO, and what I spent an hour or so of my sick leave … | Continue reading
I am sitting at the desk. Slight fever. The space heater’s white noise is filling the room. And I notice myself hum. On the exhalation. A single note. And again. Hum. It’s a D, according to the app on my phone. Too sharp to be properly flat. It’s as though white noise invites mor … | Continue reading
Because I forget too often. And I cry when I remember taking note of the all the days slipped byand still I’m unable to acknowledge this imperfect bowlof my own making or what has been tossed into it by passers-byby prophets, by bricklayerslike medieval poets or what has landed h … | Continue reading
Rosemary oil is for memory. And the little blue electric light on my desk tries to make up for the season’s darknesses. That’s not a typo. A man lashes out because he can’t escape himself while I can’t find myself. I’m not afraid of curses anymore: I’ve stopped apologizing. I’ve … | Continue reading
Memories are so unreliable. I can’t remember how I learned about travel destinations, or about diseases before the internet. How did I get through high school or college and what exactly did access mean then? Was there a time when I knew how to read a map? My reading then was ind … | Continue reading
These vacation weeks always seem to slide by, and I think that is fine. I’ve moved almost easily through the days and taken advantage of the sunshine for a change. Leonard’s muscles are stiff from the long walks to the lake and back, but he is smiling. My muscles are sore from th … | Continue reading
I am realizing that I don’t always have to be the one who attempts to accommodate everyone else’s preferences, social or otherwise. I can stop beating myself up for not succeeding at this, for not being what everyone else wants or expects. (I know this sounds banal to many. I kno … | Continue reading
There is something called a nocebo effect: it happens when someone is convinced that a medication is going to have a negative effect. I don’t think there is a word for what I have now. I am weaning off the medications and feeling more energetic than the weaning would realisticall … | Continue reading
E. has slept in a half-reclining position on the couch for 3 nights now. I am grateful I got a flu shot this winter. Though I’m honestly a little resentful that he can nap during the day. I also use it as an excuse to feign frustration over not being able to do morning yoga […] | Continue reading
I can’t remember what I have written before. So I am certain I’m repeating myself. So many things slip through and past me – always have, but the last two years things have been worse. Better and worse. Now there is the tip of a show tune nudging me just behind my ear. “Well, … [ … | Continue reading
Not first thing in the morning. Not the beginning of the week. Not the start of a month. Year. Decade. Watershed of any sort. Explore, discover, question, create. Ce n’est pas an inspirational meme. The doctor says this is my problem. I’m stifled. Yesterday I looked up the dates … | Continue reading
There are so many thoughts now that I can’t write here. Not now. Maybe it’s time to start another handwritten practice. I’m not sure what is happening to be honest. I have lost ambition. I’m not happy about it. But on the other hand, it feels like sleep. I know I can’t be bothere … | Continue reading
A half an hour has passed and I’ve not written a word. In the other room, a CD is playing: “Dharma Collection”. It stores in a red velvet case. I have had it for years and have never quite decided whether I like it. So it is one of those mornings. I am hyper aware […] | Continue reading
I was scrolling on Facebook this morning – something I don’t do very often anymore. Someone posted, “Be careful around unhappy people.” And I thought – yeah, that is why I am not scrolling on Facebook often anymore. Reading comment threads feels too often like watching toddlers s … | Continue reading