Science rescued poetry for me. Verse had charmed me as a child. Dad often read kid-friendly poems aloud; I can still recite The Owl and the Pussycat and How Doth the Little Crocodile. Mom encouraged us to write haiku, limericks, and other forms as part of our homeschool education. My whole family loved Shel Silverstein’s … More Unconstrained By Form: Three Poets Who Studied Nature Through Verse
Too often I forget that Nature is more than a postcard: an exotic destination like jungles, deserts, or coral reefs. It’s not a place we visit, but a realm we inhabit. Environmental phenomena can whisk us on journeys even in the humblest urban landscape. Still we chase the thrill of terra nova, like earlier this … More Vanishing Vagabonds: Crossing Paths With Bohemian Waxwings
Power thrums through the headset. Every nerve sizzles with alien sensations: water flowing over speckled skin, the lingering taste of fish, a symphony of echoes lapping my mind’s protean shore. Phantom limbs unfurl into a broad tail… My writing has undergone significant evolution in the past few years. I shifted from YA to adult fiction, … More Journey to “The Protean Shore”: Writing for Mason Jar Press’ Literary Journal
As if writing and photography weren’t enough creative pursuits to consume a person, I also play music. Not terribly well, since I rarely have time to practice these days, but it’s still a strong frequency in my spirit. Thus when a music artist on Mastodon sought voice segments for a project, I responded. Recording a … More “After the Noise”: A Music/Poetry Collaboration
Apparently I’ve written a seminal work of cli-fi, but it wasn’t one of my books. In a recent BBC Culture piece titled What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong, self-proclaimed literary scholar Tyler Harper argues that the genre does not inspire environmental action among readers, but demoralizes them. He alleges the … More What A “Literary Scholar” Gets Wrong: A Climate Fiction Author’s Rebuttal
I rarely write poetry these days, but some experiences defy capture in any other form. Like last week, when I stumbled into a murder. Running along the river just after sunrise, swathed in the damp-earth smells of recent rain, the rhythm of my feet had lulled me into a meditative mind. A flash of black … More Poem: Rabbit. Raven. Runner
Wild Type 