I think the brief sweet spot of travel is coming to an end. At least for now. Things have been absurdly busy since returning from vacation. I am super stoked to share that I've had a poem accepted to Muzzle for this fall, which was a massive goal of mine this summer. I've started doing some editing work on the side, and there is an oppotunity to release another collection sooner rather than later. I'm so endlessly thankful to be a writer. More big(bigger, biggest?) news coming in the not-distant future. For now it's back to all sorts of grinds. Here's to momentum. Oh and nature. Here's to nature as well because she's been knocking my socks off.

I'm down to 1 book left in my first print run. The rest have all been sold/spoken for, and it feels so surreal and exciting to say that. My words have found their way to the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, England, the west and east coast of the US and to a smattering of cities in between. I've received photos of it on beds, in open palms, on a stack of other beloved books. It feels like I've sent out bits of love and the love has returned to me in tiny, beautiful ways. I'm so grateful. For all of it. I was catching up with my dear friend Joseph via video chat today and expressed to him how I've been feeling both proud and guilty. Proud of myself for working so hard the past few months, for fully immersing myself in the hard work that comes with diving into one's craft. And guilty because of this busy-ness. I'm used to being someone who gives a lot of time to checking in on others, and lately I've felt more pulled away from that than usual. It's ...

Acknowledge the lump of clay on the pottery wheel for what it is: a lump, full of too much and unformed. You hands work it into shape, your hands work it into collapsing. Your hands build again. You make too much. Things get messy. Maybe a vase with a Pisa Tower's belly, or a mug sprouting handles unti it is spider. We are too precious about these first moments of possibility. That is the first thing I stress to other poets. You cannot be precious about the first draft. You cannot expect a body with all of its bones and sinew, ready to run. Resist the urge to immediately abandon these fragments. You may not use all of these things. You may build it all and need only a tooth. Or a vein. You may only have a head, the thick of thigh, or if you're lucky, a heart--bloody and rolling.

So much of writing is reading, researching. This week, I've been poring over my own archives as I cobble together an outline for the next book. My own archives include twenty-one years of journaling--not straight through, not always consistently, but there is something to show for every year between then and now and that is something. I've done this before--going back and perusing. But never all the way through. Never in this place in time, and so it feels all new again. And alongside all the journaling are poems, which at times reveal more than we intend. What was once an amusing exercise now feels notably more emotional. To read back through all of these versions of self, to walk the path while knowing where it goes(or where it doesn't)...I am overwhelmed with what remained and what changed. All of it. I am both embarassed and intrigued by my youth--my rambling telling of it, how some things were given play-by-play and some were too full to recount it. Instead, I would j...

Snow is falling. The radar is a just-bloomed bruise stretching backwards from here to Indiana. The precipitation is not the slow and drifting romance of a meandering snowfall, but much faster--almost reading like rain through the window. I can hear the tiny click-click of ice mixed in hitting. A sky of bad reception. This is the kind of snow that falls to build and build fast. I'm sitting and typing with my coffee, light therapy blaring, and a picture of young me open on the desktop. I am six or seven in the photo--bangs of my Dorothy Hamill haircut in my eyes, scrawny legs jutting from light blue shorts. I am emerging from a kid ride in the amusement park--giant yellow and blue sandbags hang on either side of me. I vaguely remember the maze of heaviness, each one swinging slow and nudging you in different directions. I have just finished saying something, or I'm about to speak, mouth almost open and one small hand poised outward. I'm wearing a white tshirt and a giant pla...

Oh my heart is both so heavy and light. Finally emerging from the fog of a 2 day migraine and back at my desk doing the final adjustments on the book. This is where I am feeling both free and sad. Once again the word bittersweet feels necessary. The pit of me is such a hodge podge of things. There is relief and pride, there is fear and something else I can only refer to as a sharp sadness. I've always had a complicated relationship with goodbyes. Finishing the book feels like one, whether I meant it to or not. It does. I've spent hours and hours with these poems. I've felt both anger and love for them at times. Never have I felt so connected to a body of work. There's the feeling of saying what I needed to say and also barely denting the surface. I didn't expect to feel so emotional about it. But here I am with tears in my eyes, proud and afraid and brave. Writing this book pulled me through the remainder of this bizarre year. Writing it put to rest what stayed fit...

My labor of love is rounding its final few corners. I say this with a mix of pride and peace. I've worked hard, harder than I've ever worked on a collection of writing before. I can say that and mean it. Be it maturity or timing, I've discovered a new love and understanding when it comes to the page. I suppose I have this year to thank for some of that growth. What a strange time to be living. I think certain personal decisions and energies are palpable to others, whether we mean them to be or not. Kind of like how one shitty attitude can dull a room in record time. Those close to me have noticed something mended--as if writing and I took a long, lush walk sometime over the summer and squashed some shit being avoided for much too long. In the past I've likened my connection to my work as that of a bad lover--erratic, intense, hot and cold and never sure. I simply don't feel that way anymore. I don't want to love anything in a harmful way, especially myself. I ...

Writing this book has been like finding a vein and following it until it breaks off into two, and then choosing one to follow which then branches into fours, and I never pick the first and go with the third, which leads me into another roundabout of choices. Vein after vein after vein. A memory bleeds into another and another until all I can truly get down is the color, the weather maybe. When I hit this point, I reach out to two writer friends seeking advice. One suggests stepping away, taking a break. The other says write through it. Both are right, but I get a good chuckle out of their opposing views. I do step away, and I do return to go through it. There is immense freedom in believing in the work you are doing--motivation is more at the ready, little seems forced. That said, belief in the work adds to the risk. I want so much for what I believe in. I trust myself which is downright frightening(and again, freeing). Fear is not going to leave so I might as well set an extra place ...

Mary Oliver died yesterday. 83 years old. She is a pulitzer prize winning poet, a writer who believed in mostly staying private and allowing the work to speak for her. Her work is largely nature-based, but cutthroat. Oliver loved taking walks and eventually hid pencils in the trees for herself among them, so she would never be without one should inspiration strike. Her work is something that starts on the outside and works inward. Oliver's words have stung and stuck me for a long, long time. Do musicians feel this way about one another when one of their own pass away? Do steel workers, acrobats, dancers, taxi drivers? Mary Oliver was one of us, a poet. Is this why the news is hitting so hard, sticking a bit more solid? I'm not sure. But her death feels like something heavy that I am carrying now. When Death Comes Mary Oliver When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse s...