Are you thankful that you can read this? Give the gift of literacy to new immigrants, and sponsor me in my 30 Poems in November fundraiser. Here is today’s poem for your enjoyment. Have a tasty holiday! Ode to Butternut Squash Butternut squash, you are the War and Peace of vegetables. So heavy, traditional, symbolic
30 Poems in November: Your Turkey Day Reminder Read More »
Poet, activist, and spiritual workshop leader Robert McDowell sent out this powerful poem in his e-newsletter to commemorate the International Day to End Violence Against Women (Nov. 25). McDowell’s work focuses on actualizing the sacred feminine to bring about gender equality and reconciliation. He has kindly allowed me to reprint it below. The Promise of
Poetry by Robert McDowell: “The Promise of Hunter’s Moon” Read More »
Two opportunities are coming up for blog readers to sponsor me for a good cause. First, I’ll be writing a poem a day in November to raise money for the Center for New Americans. CNA is a community-based, nonprofit adult education center that provides the under-served immigrant, refugee and migrant communities of Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley
Sponsor Me: Fall Fundraisers for Literacy and Domestic Violence Services Read More »
One perk of having a Kindle is the unlimited supply of M/M romance e-books that I can now enjoy, free from concerns about privacy and shelf space. I’ve read a couple of standouts that I’ll discuss below, and meanwhile have been thinking about some peculiarities of the genre. I was never really a fan of
Summer Reads: Some Gay Romances Read More »
Dear readers, join me in the happy dance: I HAVE FINISHED* THE ENDLESS NOVEL**. (*a good major revision of) (**Book One of Two in the series) Paraphrasing French author Paul Valéry, the poet W.H. Auden famously observed that “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” This quote sticks in my mind as I sort
On Finishing (Sort of) the Endless Novel Read More »
The NY Times, the New Republic, and a slew of feminist blogs have recently been debating whether it’s appropriate for educators to put trigger warnings about potentially traumatic material on their syllabus. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has taken the tack that students should expect to be challenged and disquieted by new ideas in the
Trigger Warnings in Education: Some Reminiscences and Suggestions from a Survivor Read More »
Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. The French proverb sums up the conventional story arc of healing and closure, encountered repeatedly in inspirational articles and literary novels that take on the difficult subject of abuse. The survivors in these stories are depicted as stuck in pain and anger from the past until they discover their perpetrator’s
The Questionable Value of an Abuser’s Back-Story Read More »
Charlie Bondhus’s masterful, heart-wrenching new poetry collection, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), could not have been written in any previous generation. In the closeted centuries following the Greco-Roman era, the poetry of gay male love and the poetry of war have only been permitted to overlap in sublimated and metaphorical
Charlie Bondhus: War Poet for the Post-DADT Era Read More »
As a fiction writer and a person of faith, I can be stymied by worries over what is “real” versus “in my head”. Where is the line that separates fictional archetypes and imaginative projections from a genuine encounter with an unseen deity, and what distinguishes both of those experiences from the voices heard by the
Trust Your Imaginary Friends, and Don’t Scare the Horses Read More »
This year, I resolved to lose 200 pounds. Of books. We are surgically attached to our iPhones in this house, so much so that Shane’s first instance of imaginative play was holding a block up to his ear and pretending to talk to it. However, I haven’t been able to warm up to reading e-books.
Thoughts from the Great Book Purge of 2014 Read More »