Writing

At a glance:

• Journalism — radio news scripts; Philippines & California,
• Editorial — books, magazines, sites, collateral — I am currently the Features Editor at the Martha's Vineyard Times,
• Nonfiction — book,
• Poetry — three books.

Poetry

We Plié

A link to the full We Plié manuscript as published (with margin notes.)

My second book We Plié (link to publisher) is an experiment in repetition. It is a one hundred poem book, divided into five sections. Each poem builds on the previous poem. It is an accordion — it uses a sort or concatenation to build meaning, much like a dense sonata.

Here's a poem from that collection, toward the end of We Plié, where every word and phrase has been previously used to the point the themes are familiar to the reader.

what-life, wilderness. what dawn. its smallness and our, our line strung on with it. what flotsam, flock tours my kindness, walk. without laughter I remove your head, place it on the body you love. a way west to the filigree of pleasure and shadow.

migration did this to me. an inside, a life of ridiculous nature. the trembling bigness in a thing buries hinted surroundings, powders blue ocean with a kiss. its chair, there, in looped loop, the cumulus what—fear or flame or frame listen-ing.

without it, not just friend but family, little dots of dots recur, sparse scent of equal, of, to. this hills in us a dusting, wind-blown—that is if we could remember birds on strings, what huddles seated children and their ultimately severable lives.

it mentions you, the to and of of it. the broken line’s forgiven your tense, its recurrent knot. through it we hurtle across self and self. re-play now and then explains we, makes me duplicate—its aperture-inducing past and future.

this can’t be the way it is. can’t be a node on cheek and neck. forced through straw, the tiny it resurfaces the pollen of you. where we plays still, mind between kissings slips. now, ground’s clear. now begins the courtship of blank justice.

Nonfiction

You Must Believe In Spring

Link to full unedited manuscript

It's a year in my life — May 10 to May 10 — structured day by day as an almanac of sorts. Not a nature, celestial, or weather chronologue — more that until a November 4th, stage four lung cancer call from my mother.

Excerpt

You Must Believe in Spring

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Jan 27

Another batch of Cracklin’ Cornbread lifts her enthusiasm, makes her eyes glow and hands clap. But, the day’s subdued, and I suspect the fluid in her lungs is building to discomfort, urging more ‘shut-in’ more fatigue. Her energy dip is a subtle, likely painful escape from this invasive sapping.

“I’m not as chipper today.” And, although her eyes glow they dim in a similar quick-shifting variability as babies do.

Though I try, I cannot sync in to her sleepiness, her fatigue, the waking-dream she lives/disperses/hides from. She reaches to her hip — “I thought it was that ball.” I'm not sure what “ball,” she hems and says, “That bottle for draining the fluid in my lung — “I must have been half-dreaming”.

All objects and objectivity blur and withdraw into some loose focus. ‘It,’ (the indefinite pronoun and object) is too blurred to catch a rhythm and anticipate her next need, or syncopate or even participate in her ‘world’.

Her intoxicated world was once on a hot boil, my full-on co-dependency with her past alcoholism, her failure to sort and shuffle the imagined life in her youth with the world. An enormous curiosity only part-met by the place and life she occupied. Now — that alcohol self of her is long-vanished, that lost-child of me part-dispensed — and our relationship is becoming new, reciprocal, but only part-intuited here in this one.

Our relationship slack-lines her, then me, above a minute by minute parade of care, wash, brush, spoon-feed, and her: “I’m just a weakling.” What can one do but continue to make sure the line is tied to both ends, whatever those knots are, whatever those ends, until the ends just disappear.

Or, with it the line is only the drier tumbling sheets for tonight, for later, her door slightly ajar.

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Editorial

I'd like to say my most satifying work as a writer was writing editorial letters in Arts & Ideas. I'd get to design the entire magazine around the arts and ideas of people on an Island and around the world. Then I'd scribble a concise, culturally relevant, socially meaningful, human synopsis.

The magazine made a difference in eight issues (before I sold it.) So the letters weren't frivolous or vain — I believe. But, they are culturally antiquated — same stories, same needs a decade on, with more racism, illness, autocracy, war.

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Summer 2012

This summer A&I will publish three magazines loosely based on two themes: imagination and resilience. These are big, broad themes that touch us all.

The ideas of imagination and resilience come with a question: How do we as individuals and a community imagine and create new things, and how do we respond to shock?

This summer we won’t so much try to answer these questions as we will share the evidence of imagination and resilience found here. This evidence is in each of us: In the life of a ninety-year-old. In the loss of a loved one. In an innovative response to the cost of fossil fuel. In imagining geologic time and glaciers. And, of course in imagination made evident in full through the arts.

The reason behind these themes is straightforward. Imagination is essential. It’s on par with knowledge, food, clothing, money. It carries us to the moon, to ancient China, to cures for cancer. With it we make simple, tasty meals. Most of all, imagination carries us beyond limits, and in limiting times that’s important.

The arts work hand in hand with our community’s health. They can strengthen our imagination, so we might better overcome the collapse of the housing market or another spike in the price of oil, the cost and practice of healthcare. Imagination gives us bounce, relieves stress in reflection and in the act of creation. A&I won’t fix things, but by surfacing and celebrating our arts and resilience as a community we hope to help us better imagine.

In this issue, Trudy Taylor shares her infinitely curious self. Sarah Das talks about the Laurentide and Greenland ice sheets. Sam Feldman, Sandy Broyard and others discuss grief and recovery from the loss of loved ones. We also look at the prospects for solar energy and the potential to generate our own renewable energy. We even draw on a national author to share his ideas on imagination and how creativity works.

Perhaps most important and relevant, imagination and resilience are essential aspects of island life. They take on particular social value and meaning here in people’s make do, bring forth, create and recreate a life approach. Life on the margin does that. And, whether people are wealthy or struggling on this island living here is creative; it points to possibilities, to bounce and imagination.