Author, Writer, Poet
I was honored to read with 30 Unsolicited Press authors on the AWP Bookfair Stage in Seattle. What a blast.
We each only had time for one poem or a short passage of fiction, and all the authors left the audience wanting more. Looking forward to doing it again next year!
Here is a brief video of me reading “The Poet’s Garage”, the title poem from my poetry collection.
Creatrix from John Abercrombie and Dave Creamer is the perfect soundtrack. Two jazz guitar masters, highly creative and inspiring. Available on spotify, apple music.
Overwhelmed. Thanks to those who bought my book and to Unsolicited Press. I greatly enjoyed sharing poems and stories at AWP.
You can order The Poet’s Garage from Unsolicited Press or your favorite bookstore.
Thank you to the design team at Unsolicited Press! My new novel will drop 7/11/23, and it’s beginning to feel almost real.
Here is a brief synopsis of The Bridge on Beer River:
A rust belt city in decline retains the solace of romance, which often proves to be an empty promise or even a curse. With a wry perspective and unflappable determination, Curt embodies all the town’s ills, including his own problems with drinking, work, and relationships, as he tries to save himself and rescue his friends in his own unconventional and unlawful ways. In The Bridge on Beer River, a novel-in-stories set in Reagan-era Binghamton, New York, characters scramble for subsistence while hoping for love and a better life.
I will be posting more information in the coming months, but you can read some of the stories from the novel that have appeared in literary magazines HERE.
Sad day for our house and neighborhood, watching our huge Monterey pine cut down. With a diameter of over three feet, the old tree was already a giant when we moved into its yard in 1994.
We had it trimmed and topped several times to reduce its weight, but age and drought finally won, along with the attacks of beetles and fungus. This spring the new fronds at the ends of its branches began to brown and drop, beginning its death march.
For several days this week, the loud staccato wails and grinding drones of chainsaws and chippers seemed to come from inside my head like a trip to the dentist. Even in its final state the old tree is hard to bring down, resisting and only giving itself up chunk by chunk.
We always thought the yard belonged to the pine. Everywhere we dig we find a tangle of roots, some thicker than utility pipes, pushing through native slate and skimming the surface before diving again. If the tree ever fell it would take the yard and house with it, which is why we had to remove it once it died. We are its tenants, but for once in history the tenants are evicting the landlord.
Our sky will seem so bare. I find myself apologizing to the tree the way I always apologize when I cut down a Christmas tree, but this giant requires deeper remorse. I won’t take all the blame for the drought, but scientists tell us our cars, furnace, and power plants are much to blame, and I own some of the polluters.
We have plans to replace it with a redwood, natural to our dry hillside and our dripping Bay Area fog, assuming we can find a space in our yard relatively free of resistant pine roots. Although it will take several decades for the redwood sapling to fill the ecological void left by the Monterey pine, it feels like penance. Not enough but a start.