Poet Reporter
A different kind of reporting, through the eyes of a poet.
World-Building
If you’ve been reading me for a while you know I wrote my first who-dunnit in Fifth Grade. “Midnight… Murder?” was destined to be a hit. And as soon as I find it--likely in an attic somewhere--it still might be.
But that first story wasn’t all sunshine and roses. (Murder rarely is.) When my babysitter (today she would be considered my first beta reader) read the story and immediately knew who the killer was, I realized I needed to do a rewrite…
Yesterday’s Socks
I’ve waited tables in at least five U.S. States. In one of them, a restaurant owner told me his secret to getting through a split shift: Clean socks. A split is where you work lunch, go home for an hour, then return to work dinner. (A double, by contrast, is two eight-hour shifts with no break in between.)…
The Doorkeeper
When life gets overwhelming, and even when it seems a bit pointless, one of the best things you can do is surround yourself with art. Art rejuvenates the soul. It awakens a place of light and warmth within you and helps you begin to believe again…
Root Ball
We had a tree in our front yard that neighbors said looked like the Tree of Life. It was a honey locust, tall, old, and beautiful. In the winter when all of its greenery was gone, it simply stood tall. In the spring, it would produce these little seedpods that looked like ribbons that would spiral to the ground…
Better on Paper
My family got together a few weeks ago to make ravioli for Easter. We gathered on a Friday night, ate pizza, and then rolled up our sleeves to get to work with flour and eggs, rolling and filling…
Inner Motives
When I was working for lobbyists in D.C. and also waiting tables in the suburbs of that great city in the evenings, there was a man who came in to the coffee shop one night and sat in my section. I’d seen him in there before. He’d been working his way through all of the sections and it was only a matter of time until he found his way to mine…
The Blue Binder
I have a few manuscripts piling up. Some projects aren’t quite finished yet; others need one last piece in order for their stories to come together.
Today I had an epiphany about one of these projects as I washed dishes. This particular manuscript (that I printed and placed in a blue binder so it can stare at me every time I enter my office)…
Where We Are Drawn
A few years ago, my sister and her husband bought a house in the countryside that had been vacant for a while and whose well had gone dry. Rather than pay to tap into the county water line that was two miles away, they decided to dig another well. The question was where. The neighbors down the road told them to contact the Water Witch…
Drawing That Line
Did you ever sign up for something and almost instantly regret it? Like, maybe at the time you were thinking, “Well, my initial answer is no, but this might be a good learning experience for me…” Then you get roped in to a little more, and a little more, and before long it snowballs out of control. Suddenly everyone is telling you what you should do, and just because you don’t want to, what does that matter?
Emergence
Ah, emergence. This is my favorite word. I love it because it’s a bubbling up to the surface, a process of revealing something once concealed.
Not to be confused with emergency—no one likes those. But emergence and emergency come from the same Latin root. Emergence went the way of rising up, and coming to light, while emergency took the short, quick road to a sudden, unforeseen event…
Crabmeat Cheesecake
Memory portals. That’s the phenomenon where songs and movies can transport us back to a favorite time in our lives.
I love the movie Twister, likely for the memory portal it opens up for me. I’m talking about the original from 1996, not so much the new version. I was living in Myrtle Beach for the summer between college semesters, interning for a newspaper…
Champions Abound
The Olympic Games give us a couple magical weeks to find new heroes, reclaim old ones, and to relive the excitement of times when we were involved in something bigger than ourselves. It’s like being on vacation as a kid and jumping out of bed the moment you woke up because something big was going on and you didn’t want to miss any of it…
Champion Road
With the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl happening in the same weekend, everywhere we look we see champions. We’re surrounded by athleticism, grace, tenacity, and a never give up spirit…
Rise Above
When I was a kid, I thought I was Spiderman. I even had the web shooters for my wrists and used to run around catching household items in my webs. When I got a little older, I wanted to be Wonder Woman. I had a red cardigan with buttons that I would wear as a jacket outside when the Pennsylvania weather was decent…
Enter the Steam
There’s a story written in the 1940s by William Sansom about prisoners who have to wring the water out of a long sheet. Have you read this? If they can get the sheet to dry completely, they can gain their freedom and leave the prison. But to complicate matters, every so often the wardens release steam into the prison rooms, dampening the sheets the prisoners been wringing out…
The Next Ten
When I was little, my mom would take my sister and me skiing in the winter. My mom loved to ski, but she felt that paying a babysitter while she went skiing was too much indulgence, not to mention she thought we’d like it, so her solution was simple: Bring us with her…