My new novel Never Coming Back has been in the world just over a month now. I’m grateful to the readers and reviewers who have responded to it with such heart. If you are one of them, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d post a positive review on Amazon or Goodreads. Never Coming Back is on the Midwest … Continue reading Never Coming Back: Free Skype visits to your book club!
This semester I taught a class about creative writers, identity and race. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and race sat in a huge square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. We were strangers to each other. On the first day … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Alberto Rios
When my children were tiny they went to a neighborhood preschool two or three mornings a week. It was a gentle place, taught by lovely teachers who never got upset if a glass of milk was toppled or if someone broke a crayon. There was a dress-up corner, a story-time corner, a Lego corner. In … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry
When my son was a year and a half he came down with a stomach flu. After a couple of days the vomiting and diarrhea had calmed down, but he was quiet and listless. I wasn’t terribly worried but something told me to take him to the clinic, so I did. His doctor examined him … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye
After a reading from my new novel Never Coming Back the other night, I spoke with a woman in the audience about synesthesia, that syndrome whereby senses cross and fuse with each other. “So as someone is talking, you don’t simultaneously see the words they’re saying inside your head?” I asked the woman, and she shook … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Maggie Smith
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Political Tentacles
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
The Good Things Black People Do, Give and Receive All Over The World
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
Bipolar is my superpower
