My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Someone once asked me to describe a place that would feel perfectly safe. The feeling of being held inside a fallen hollow tree next to a river on a summer day –warm, safe, almost asleep–instantly came to me. This is the same feeling that comes with my … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Linda Hogan
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. How to survive the next meeting you don’t want to be in: Focus on the famished, clawed creature that just now slunk into the room and is now crawling over everyone’s feet in turn. Does anyone else notice? They do not! Where is the creature now? The … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ron Koertge
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. The pink stucco and stone house across the street is slanty, sprawling, and old, with a few apartments carved out of what at one point must have been a single-family house. I think of it as the Francis of Assisi house – the place exudes an easygoing … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Grace Schulman
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Hearing someone use the word “they” when describing a group of people –gay, Black, poor, immigrant, etc.–makes me wary and tired because I know I then have to tilt my head and say When you say ‘they,’ who exactly do you mean? I hate doing this because … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Harryette Mullin
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. Yesterday a friend told me that when his family tracks mud inside he goes silent and forces himself to be calm while he scrubs it away. He doesn’t want his children to go through what he did. As he spoke I remembered yelling at my little kids … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Michael Pearce
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. This gorgeous poem goes out to all the gay men –my love and thanks for the boundless comfort and acceptance and laughter and love you have given me my entire adult life–and gay women and gay children and teens I’ve loved in my life, and lo, there … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Chen Chen
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. The other day I passed a tall chemo-bald man in a fur hat despite the warm day. They cut the bad parts out and now I’m good to go, he told the UPS driver. I smiled at him and he waved, full of cheer. The broken world … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Jim Moore
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. My family is multiracial so these latest murders, of eight Asian Americans in Atlanta by yet another white guy with a Hitler haircut, feel more personal to me, more terrifying, right? Wrong. The idea that it’s on Asian Americans and their families to speak out against hatred … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Langston Hughes
Hi everyone. How are you? Surviving? Possibly looking ahead and wondering how, when all’s said and done in this pandemic era of so much upheaval and reckoning, life will be different? Hard to say. Hard to know. One thing that seems certain already is that storytelling —by artists in all forms—is alive and well and … Continue reading “Building a Story,” my new five-week workshop
My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here. “Paco, my one real goal in life is for you to be happy.” Actual words that came out of my mouth yesterday. There’s no come on, hurry up about walks with this boy. He gets to choose where he wants to go and how long he wants … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen
Goodies from my mailbox and camera
Telling all sides of the parenting story
Waking Up to Your Dreams
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
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
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
