May the Fourth be with you! As month #3 of my captivity begins, I am falling back on my lifelong strategy of outrunning my emotions through frenetic activity. I haven’t yet succumbed to the sourdough bread baking trend on social media (I don’t like sourdough enough to work for it) but I have made very
May Links Roundup: Hypersane or Hyperactive Read More »
Today I’m honored to share two poems by Israeli writer and artist Helen Bar-Lev, a longtime Winning Writers subscriber. Helen is the Overseas Connections Coordinator for Voices Israel Group of Poets in English, and winner of numerous awards including the International Senior Poet Laureate title from the Amy Kitchener Foundation. She has had over 100
Poems of Love and Loss by Helen Bar-Lev Read More »
The Poet Spiel, a/k/a the artist Tom Taylor, has spent eight decades taking aim at warmongering, corruption, and bigotry. He depicts the pleasures and absurdities of our physical existence in blunt, earthy language. He’s kindly permitted me to reprint this ever-timely poem below. Sorry to say that WordPress formatting limitations have stripped out his line
The Poet Spiel: “Weighing In” Read More »
Week Three of my captivity: We have decided “The Magic Schoolbus” counts as homeschooling. I have a slight crush on Ms. Frizzle (that sultry voice!). Doing a 500-piece Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle despite not caring about Harry Potter or puzzles. Bought four pints of ice cream today, even though only weird flavors like Whiskey Hazelnut
April Links Roundup: Let’s Talk About Anything Else Read More »
The symbolism is too on-the-nose to be good fiction: America in the time of COVID-19 is observing Lent whether we want to or not. We are anchorites (if we’re being responsible, that is), sequestered for contemplation and mourning. This can be especially hard because we don’t have a cultural template for nonresistance. Everything is supposed
Not Business as Usual: Our Forced Lent in a Non-Liturgical World Read More »
Greetings from week one of the pandemic. As I’m a self-employed introvert, the cancellation of everything has only slightly intensified my normal sessile lifestyle, but (like everyone else) I’m too stressed to concentrate on writing my novel. Wish me luck at homeschooling the Young Master. The next month will be crucial in slowing the spread
Stay Home, Read Things Read More »
Uptown rat…You know I can’t afford to buy her trash… The quintessential New Yorker, the subway rat, turns out to have distinctive neighborhood populations just like the Big Apple’s human residents. According to The Atlantic, “New York City Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats”. In 2017, a genetics grad student at Fordham sequenced the
March Links Roundup: Uptown Rat Read More »
The Poet Spiel, a/k/a the artist Tom Taylor, has been sharing his outsider perspective on politics, sexuality, and disability for nearly 70 years in his raw poetry and passionate, psychedelic visual art. Read my review of his retrospective collection Revealing Self in Pictures and Words (2018). As a child, he suffered from headaches and seizures
Two Poems by Spiel: “the procedure” and “mixed intentions” Read More »
I don’t feel like taking life seriously this month. We all know what’s going on in the world. Let’s take a break to focus on something uplifting, like…“A Photo Study of Rock Gods’ Packages in Very Tight Trousers” (from the DesignYouTrust website). Marc Bolan is 100% transition goals–that pink crop top! that hairdo I actually
February Links Roundup: Doll Dick Read More »
This week we wrapped up a 6-month online course on masculine archetypes at the Temple of Witchcraft. Jumping off from our source text, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King Warrior Magician Lover (a somewhat dated but still intriguing “men’s movement” book from the 1990s), instructor JT Mouradian prompted us to match these archetypes to the
Poetry by Garret Keizer: “Yosodhara” Read More »