Poet Reporter
A different kind of reporting, through the eyes of a poet.
Words on Napkins
When I lived out of state, I had a little house on a quiet street, and I worked hard de-cluttering this little house room by room until the entire place looked lovely and inviting. I bought a chair, I added a TV, I had tile installed in the bathroom, I framed my favorite pictures with friends and family and my travels and I put them up all over the place…
Night Life
A little over halfway through my book, Stories From the Road, my travel buddy Brent and I arrive in Nebraska. And even though our tourist scenes take place entirely in the dark, our discoveries and flashes of insight can light up a night sky. You’ll see…
Everyday Heroes
Heroes are made in the trenches, in the moments where extreme conditions meet bravery, decisiveness, and sacrifice by amazing people who likely wouldn’t consider themselves heroic. Throughout our nation’s history, everyday people have taken it upon themselves to do extraordinary things, for love of home, country, and way of life, and their heroic actions have benefitted us all…
The Spatula
I lived with engineers in college. Actually, I lived with sorority girls who kept sending me out of the dorm room because I was this disastrous thing called Independent and they were all pledging the same sorority. So, mostly, I just crashed down the hallway with the engineering students…
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…
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…
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…
Motivation
Writers get into their characters’ headspaces. We know their backstory. We wrote it. We know why these characters act the way they do. We know how they think. So we get in there and write accordingly…
Pristine
On New Year’s Day I looked out to a lovely blanket of newly fallen snow. What had been treacherous travel the night before was now quiet, clean, and innocent-looking. The symbolism was abundant: A brand new year ushered in with a refreshingly clean slate.
Pristine is the word often used to describe this newness….
Marking the Miles 2025
Those of you who read my original blog a bunch of years ago will remember that at the end of each month I posted a “Marking the Miles” blog where we looked back over the month to my favorite writings and what they meant to me. With this year speeding toward a close, it felt appropriate to bring that tradition back…
Second Snow
The first snowfall of the season is cold and beautiful and fills you with wonder. You run to the grocery store and stock up on bread, milk, and toilet paper and then rush home to enjoy the show. As the fluffy flakes pile up, you might wander outside, taking pictures and making the first tracks in the pristine snow…