Book Review: Tomorrow, Tomorrow & Tomorrow
First great read of the New Year! This wonderful, amazing, powerful insightful novel tells a story of our generation. I've longed for a novel that is this all-encompassing, this full of heart, and this honest about the current media environment in which we live. I've...
2024: New Year
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you....
2023: The Reading Challenge
ArtsWatch: Profile of Charles Grant – Director of Christmas Carol
I'm happy to have a new piece in Oregon's ArtsWatch. This "Artist Profile" outlines the history of "Christmas Carol" director Charles Grant. Since arriving in town in 2016, Grant has made his mark in an array of roles on stage and film. Now he's Portland Playhouse's...
The Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens
The holiday season sees a million variations on Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol, yet this marvelous supernatural tale all too often overshadows the ghostly echoes that permeate Dickens’s entire oeuvre. In John Irving’s book of personal essays, Saving...
Poem: Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America
Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America Tell me what it's like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of...
Poem: New Year (Rosh Hashanah)
Rosh Hashanah - Sept 15-17, 2023 new year. Ned Hayes Rosh Hashanah comes this year on a day of cool wind, a breathtaking portent of winter taking the world, rude lover tossing the sheets away. in autumn the sadness of all things is greatest for now the world...
AI – Thoughts and Speculations regarding Books & Copyright (by Adam Neville)
A new post by writer Adam LG Nevill is on point regarding the potential effects of Artificial Intelligence tools on creative writing and writers in general. (Here's a short excerpt posted with the permission of Nevill, with more behind the fold) I'm finding that few...
In Memoriam: Cormac McCarthy
On June 13, at the age of 89, Cormac McCarthy passed away at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was profoundly unsettled and provoked by McCarthy's work, and I found his work to be powerful and insightful. His writing always delved into the darker aspects of human...
Poem: May, by Mary Oliver
May May, and among the miles of leafing, blossoms storm out of the darkness— windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees dive into them and I too, to gather their spiritual honey. Mute and meek, yet theirs is the deepest certainty that this existence too— this sense of...
Poem: Spring, by Mary Oliver
A poem by Mary Oliver Spring And here is the serpent again, dragging himself out from his nest of darkness, his cave under the dark rocks, his winter-death. He slides over the pine needles. He loops around the branches of rising grass, looking for the sun. Well who...
On Romance
Romance gets criticized for being repetitive - as if repetition is not the way we nourish our bodies and souls. Meals are repetitive: You have to keep making them and eating them and then making and eating them again. Song lyrics repeat every time a chorus comes back...
