2020-03-19 18:08
It only took a few seconds of looking at the NYTimes map of the pandemic Saturday night for me to start hyper-ventilating and crying. At that moment, I didn’t yet realize I needed pers… Read More
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reflections on writing, the land and sky by the poet laureate of kansas, author of ten books, and founder of transformative language arts at goddard college.
2020-03-12 21:43
Dear Me (and Dear Me!), I know you’re crazy-scared about the coronavirus. How could anyone paying attention not be when the closings and cancellations fall like dominos. Just in the la… Read More
2020-03-03 02:36
“It’s like an animal daycare here,” said my friend Laurie, here to give Shay some doggy acupuncture today. She was right, and with two dogs and two cats, it’s also a… Read More
2020-02-21 17:05
The tagline for the film Big Sonia is “Holocaust survivor. Grandma. Diva.” True that, but she’s also quite the Holocaust scholar, fluent in a dizzying amount of books, film… Read More
2020-02-06 22:54
Years ago when I was in the oncology center waiting room for an appointment following my bout of breast cancer, two women made me cry. One was in her 70s, and the other was her middle-aged d… Read More
2020-01-30 17:35
That’s the question I kept asking myself as I replayed “Dust in the Wind” on my quickly-wearing-out but relatively new copy of Point of Know Return. I was a 17-year-old Jer… Read More
2020-01-23 16:27
Each day I crave a clear view of a clear sky, but fog, snow, sleet, rain, freezing rain, and variety packs of all this percipitation at once fills the well-hidden vistas. Narrower perspectiv… Read More
2020-01-12 22:30
Although 2020 is already underfoot, this is my first blog post of the year, and it’s the first post that will go out to all of you who are subscribers since sometime in October when my… Read More
2019-12-31 23:50
But that's how time is: a human invention although the seasons born of the turning of the earth, the growth of the trees, and the motion of rocks moving slowly across oceans or fields keep t… Read More
2019-12-28 00:15
Lately I’ve been thinking about the Kaddish, one of the core prayers in Judaism and more or less a call and response to the life force. It seems especially relevant now at the end of t… Read More
2019-12-20 20:29
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my good friend Jerry, who died on December 13 five years ago. While revising my new collection of poetry, How Time Moves, for publication, I’m st… Read More
2019-11-26 03:49
“Has your sight come back?” people ask me. I try to find a normal way to answer an increasingly complex question because my sight in my right eye is in flux and over the cusp of… Read More
2019-10-20 23:17
I stood in the East Village Friday morning, marveling at a Langston Hughes quote I’ve never seen about falling in love with the energy of New York City each time he returned here. The… Read More
2019-10-04 01:09
In the middle of the night, Ken and I learned a whole new wrinkle of what “in sickness and in health” means as well as a new use for leftover Manischewitz Passover wine. As with… Read More
2019-09-29 22:38
I live down a winding and dipping gravel road, lately wet or puddled in its low parts because of underground springs and an abundantly rainy summer. Coming down this drive today after the lo… Read More
2019-09-15 16:40
It’s 5:47 a.m. when I wake, trying to figure out how to fit my laptop into an antique desk that’s falling apart. My worry about the dream desk starts galloping into many manner o… Read More
2019-09-09 01:47
When life feels out of control, I start counting. I first noticed this habit/neurosis/coping mechanism when I was in labor for my oldest child. I was in too much pain to count the seconds of… Read More
2019-08-28 15:11
I sit on the morning porch, the hedge apples across from me growing into softball-sized green brains, soon to be heavy enough that we’ll need to avoid parking our cars under them. The… Read More
2019-08-15 02:08
The katydids unify their song, an extended whistle-like tune with small melodic indentations. The cat who shouldn’t be outside is outside anyway, meowing that he wants to be back insid… Read More
2019-08-08 02:29
Arm-in-arm, Vicky, Eduardo, Ralph, and I walked down the snowy country road, belting out “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” and doing wheelies backwards and forward in the heavy-fa… Read More
2019-07-28 16:03
It occurred to me recently that I’m in the middle of a big life reboot. Thanks to the eye cancer, treatment, and recovery time, I’m in a different season of my life than summer w… Read More
2019-07-11 14:24
It has been a time out of time, or perhaps more accurately, a time landed right in time. Unable to use my eyes as much, I realize how most of my waking hours are encompassed in seeing. Like… Read More
2019-07-11 14:24
It has been a time out of time, or perhaps more accurately, a time landed right in time. Unable to use my eyes as much, I realize how most of my waking hours are encompassed in seeing. Like… Read More
2019-06-29 15:33
As many of you know, I’m leaping from my day job of college-level teaching to creating more transformative writing, community-building writing workshops, and a podcast series on the po… Read More
2019-06-26 15:27
When the anesthesiologist and nurse started me on Fentanyl last Wednesday, I told them I loved them both, and I meant it. By the end of the five days of hosting the gold heart of radioactive… Read More
2019-06-17 14:59
That’s what Cynthia said as she led me back to the surgery prep room when I told her I was scared. “And don’t you worry because God made women stronger so we can get throug… Read More
2019-06-11 21:11
Over udon soup and sushi at my favorite Japanese restaurant, Nomi said health challenges taught her this: “Prepare to be unprepared.” This pithy phrase speaks to just about every… Read More
2019-05-27 16:11
Throughout my healing journey — the cancer diagnosis and visits with three oncologists, the big-time scans and fears, the joys and reliefs, the waiting and preparation &mda&hell…Read More
2019-05-16 23:46
Last week, I had the honor of being one of the poets giving tribute to Denise Low, the past Kansas Poet Laureate and dear friend of 35 years. She was celebrated at the Spencer Library as a n… Read More
2019-05-01 20:41
When I had breast cancer 17 years ago, I learned some things about resilience, the ability to bounce back. There’s nothing like being thrown off a buckling bronco to discover that yes… Read More
2019-04-27 14:26
Somewhere in Brazil a bunch of people stopped their car on a highway, got out, and signaled other drivers to hold off so that a very large snake could cross the road. When I saw the video, I… Read More
2019-04-22 01:50
Emily Dickinson writes, “I started early — Took my dog.” In my case, I started late and took my croissant, and unlike Dickinson, I wasn’t looking for mermaids in the… Read More
2019-04-08 02:43
Maybe it’s the late landing of spring, the convergence of personal history and life lessons, or just chaos and good timing, but I’ve been tripping into unexpected graces lately… Read More
2019-03-24 02:16
There I was, looking for the rising moon and wondering why it hadn’t yet shown itself. Maybe it was too early for moonrise or prairie fires just to the north of Hwy. 35, which I… Read More
2019-03-15 17:02
The week began with news that blew me away: a beloved colleague, who was the rock and heart of the college where I work, died suddenly. Then the wind picked up to the tune of 50-plus mph gus… Read More
2019-03-10 18:21
Daylight Savings Time, beside being a kick that keeps kicking our sleeping patterns for a while, heralds a kind of lightening up, particularly if, like me, you’re not an early riser. F… Read More
2019-03-05 16:46
I’ve been passionate about how the way we make livings speaks, argues with, or sings loud and proud through our lives. My first degree was in labor history because of how I was innatel… Read More
2019-02-16 17:34
As life has repeatedly, February is the longest month. Maybe it’s the overwrought repetition of cold, ice, and snow after months of winter. Maybe it’s the shy hints of spring to… Read More
2019-02-09 22:27
I am watching a happy squirrel make his way through the birdseed buffet I poured along our deck railing, his tail in full fluff as he bends to gingerly pick up another black oil sunflower se… Read More
2019-02-01 04:02
Eighteen years ago, we almost lost our youngest son Forest in a car accident involving black ice, three kids and me in a van, and the only spot on the road that led to a deep ditch. Our van… Read More
2019-01-18 22:41
“I started early — took my dog” begins an Emily Dickinson poem that speaks to Mary Oliver’s generous life and poetry. She loved her dogs, getting outside early to wan… Read More
2019-01-09 19:22
When Ken and I went to Mount St. Helens with friends several years ago, I was dazzled by the patterned forests full of checkerboard green across green. Ken explained that this pattern, so un… Read More
2018-12-31 18:29
“So instead of New Year’s resolutions, I drew up a list for 2019 of experiences that had already passed: a record not of self-mastery but of genuine surprise. 1. My oncology nurs… Read More
2018-12-20 16:38
Tomorrow the world turns over: our shortening days stop in their tracks, and the light begins lengthening those days for months to come. Even the dreaded month of February, out there on the… Read More
2018-12-03 23:04
Very little in life is what we think it is, especially grief. In the three weeks since my mother-in-law died, I’ve ridden a pack of panoramic emotions in between sudden bursts of phone… Read More
2018-11-18 18:34
Yesterday, we held the memorial service for my mother-in-law, Alice Elizabeth Wells Lassman (obituary here). After crowd-sourcing some of the details for this poem from her children (includi… Read More
2018-10-29 16:10
A few hours after the Tree of Life shooting, we clung to each other — singing, praying, crying — at the Beth Israel Center in Madison, WI. Family members, old and new friends, an… Read More
2018-10-22 17:56
One of the wonders of this world are mountains of maples at the peak of fall foliage, and I was lucky enough to dwell among recently at the Power of Words conference at Goddard College. &hell…Read More
2018-09-28 16:10
Yesterday, a woman spoke with great poise, integrity, and courage about how she was terrified that the supreme court nominee would accidentally kill her when he put his hand over her mouth w… Read More
2018-09-09 21:37
This pre-Rosh Hashana afternoon, as I watch a dive-bombing hummingbird and a dozen others just trying to get a drink from our feeder, my mind is on community. How we can make and keep commun… Read More
2018-09-07 19:40
This week I drove 100 miles west and back on Tuesday, then two and a half hours southeast on Thursday, mostly through rural weaves of prairie and brome field where cattle grazed or doz… Read More
2018-09-03 15:07
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about hospitality in relationship to both writing and self-care. As someone who loves home (and also roaming widely), and making welcoming spaces… Read More
2018-08-18 15:20
“Your big rocks are the rituals of pause,” Dr. Neela Sandal told me a few weeks ago. I’ve been working with Neela for a few years to tunnel out (successfully too!) of some… Read More
2018-08-09 01:12
In my favorite Rumi poem, “Say Yes Quickly,” I love these lines especially: Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyon… Read More
2018-08-07 15:53
Here is a poem about this moment’s offering all around where I live. May this election day bring us lovely and happy surprises too. Surprise Lilies Green shots, pink ribbons in… Read More
2018-07-31 14:33
The last few days of July are truly Christmas for All in the Alleys. Because this is a college town with a whole lot of students, too-well equipped by their fretting parents with stuff they… Read More
2018-07-23 16:14
I’m in love with Lake Superior, and the more I visit, the deeper I fall. Not only is this the greatest of the Great Lakes, containing 10% of all the fresh water on earth, but it’… Read More
2018-07-12 22:02
I’m lucky. I get to go on a vacation, not something everyone has the privilege of doing so that they can enter into a great un-doing or other-the-usual-doings in a new or old place. Fo… Read More
2018-07-04 15:21
“Show a little inspiration, show a little spark,” Mary Chapin Carpenter sings in her song “The Hard Way.” Kelley Hunt, one of my beloveds and my songwriting partner… Read More
2018-06-22 19:36
“That’s caveman stuff, and there’s no way you can stop it,” my friend Kris told Ken and me over carrot-orange-ginger juice and corn meal pancakes at the Roost today… Read More
2018-06-11 15:41
I screwed up. When it comes to some close friends who suffer greatly from the kind of depression beyond comprehension — mine at least — I haven’t always underst… Read More
2018-06-05 14:50
I started teaching when I was 26. It was English 101 at the University of Kansas, a gig I figured would help me get through graduate school so I could cozy up with my real calling: writing… Read More
2018-05-24 15:41
With temperatures rising to summertime and good rains falling last week, everything is speeding into growth around this house. The hostas look like they’re on steroids, and all blossom… Read More
2018-05-17 04:56
Why are they so mind-blowingly beautiful? Is it the delicate petal, something between paper and flesh? Or the enormous resilience of seemingly delicate twists of blossoming ethers that can h… Read More
2018-05-04 02:00
Did you know you can sing “Weeding in the Rain” to the same tune as “Singing in the Rain”? In a sense, both songs are about falling in love, at least for Gene Kelly a… Read More
2018-04-26 14:16
Usually, April, what T.S. Eliot called the cruelest month, is, but it’s also stunningly beautiful, a paradox for a working poet and a gal who, all too often, couldn’t say no. Bec… Read More
2018-04-15 15:58
As I was leaving the house for our trip to Bentonville, Arkansas — a weekend of r & r, and excuse to visit the amazing Crystal Bridges museum — I ran back inside to grab a co… Read More
2018-03-31 22:09
Every March, I seek the magnolia trees growing recklessly in Kansas where it’s almost guaranteed that their tree-full of pink blossoms will meet Mean Old Mr. Winter with a fury. These… Read More
2018-03-27 15:19
Our long gravel drive was puddled and muddy, so there was no way the huge semi carrying my new book, Miriam’s Well: A Modern Day Exodus, could slip-slide to our house without aski… Read More
2018-03-20 19:55
Nothing like a brisk walk on the first day of spring in East Lawrence with a good friend. Along the way, we saw many more friendly sites, all illuminating the wonderful quirkiness of East La… Read More
2018-03-16 20:23
I love the prevernal season perhaps best of all: that space between the start of spring and before the leafing out of the big, green world. There’s such a brief series of moment betwee… Read More
2018-03-13 19:58
What does Right Livelihood mean in the context of TLA? How does it relate to finding and staying in conversation with our life’s work while keeping the cupboards and gas tank full as w… Read More
2018-02-25 16:12
Okay, a confession: I wander through my days with great anticipation for the next meal. Even if it’s just a hot cup of strong tea and bowl of brown rice cereal, envisioning what I get… Read More
2018-02-14 16:38
Yesterday was an in-between day taken up with driving, flying, walking long underground vortexes of color and sound, flying some more, and a whole lot more driving to go from Lawrence, Kansa… Read More
2018-02-10 21:14
What to call a fictional women’s collective running a potato farm in Moab, Utah in my novel Miriam’s Well? What else but “Mrs. Potato Head” (yes, the Mrs. instead of… Read More
2018-02-06 16:40
I find them irresistible: hand-sewn old quilt tops dreaming of a real life, a little like the Velveteen Rabbit before someone loved him to death (and rebirth as a real rabbit… Read More
2018-02-01 17:41
The starlings grabbed my attention while I was pacing the living room on a phone call. They poured diagonally down to the lawn, fanning out to bop and dip on the winter grass, then swooshed… Read More
2018-01-22 04:43
Spring doesn’t bounce in for months as a long-term resident at the inn we call Kansas. Instead, it struts its stuff in flashes, quite literally right now, like a famous actress who doe… Read More
2018-01-09 03:54
As part of a ceremony for a dear friend who’s about to become a mother, all the participants were asked how becoming a mother changed us. For me, answering that in is fullness would ta… Read More
2018-01-03 19:17
The temperature is up to the 20s after days in the minuses that made us layer clothing and heavy food. The chickadees span across the deck railing for their bird seed buffet. The happy dog p… Read More
2018-01-02 20:23
Hello out there! Here is a link to see “The Writing Life,” where I share cool stuff, including a featured writing — Kansas Poet Laureate Kevin Rabas this month, a writing p… Read More
2017-12-29 00:33
What impressed me first was his sestina, a very challenging kind of poem he wrote after hanging with a bunch of us fellow state poets laureate at a lingering dinner at a Concord, New Hampshi… Read More
2017-12-21 15:57
When Jen Scovell-Parker and Shon Parker, professors at McNally Smith College of Music, got the email December 14th that the college was closing in a week and they wouldn’t be rec… Read More
2017-12-11 16:39
I thought it was a bust, but the boon just hadn’t happened yet. We wanted 100,000 snow geese, but just saw a handful of eagles, and 100 swans, still beautiful and magnificent, bu… Read More
2017-12-01 02:56
I’ve learned over the years that it’s never a mistake to drive around with a bookstore in a rolling suitcase just in case, and that’s especially true when there’s a n… Read More
2017-11-25 23:29
A growing pile of old quilts has been staring at me for months, and in the last week, I finally succumbed to the call of the fabric. You see, these quilts held us and our history for so many… Read More
2017-11-18 23:21
In memory of Neil Salkind, who died today. We sat at a small table in La Prima Tassa on a spring day filtering sunshine across our table, sipping tea and updating each other on our children… Read More
2017-11-17 23:44
It’s almost balmy although this late afternoon is quickly tipping toward dusk. The leaves are strangely still attached to trees around town but mostly in clumps the cold snap, hard rai… Read More
2017-11-09 15:44
At breakfast at the Swedish Country Inn in Lindsborg, Kansas, someone said she liked my tiny gold Dala horse necklace. It took me a moment to realize that the C’hai — the Jewish… Read More
2017-11-04 04:08
It started with gerunds, a grammatical term for verbs that end in “ing.” To write directly and precisely, writers are supposed to avoid gerunds, Uncle Ron read in a tiny newspape… Read More
2017-10-20 20:26
I was 19, and I knew it was sexual harassment, but there was nothing I could do about it. He managed the movie theater where I worked concessions, and after I refused to meet him a little ap… Read More
2017-09-20 15:44
I’m perched on this lovely porch on the last day of the year, at least the last day according to the Jewish year, which ends at sundown. The wind and crickets thread sound through the… Read More
2017-09-18 15:27
Late last night, as I sent my novel Miriam’s Well to my wonderful publisher, Steve Semken of Ice Cube Press, I reworked a summary of this 500-plus page book that’s been at the he… Read More
2017-09-07 04:49
You can drive a long way in Kansas and never leave the state, like 340 miles west from my home to western Kansas, and still be a ways from a state border. That’s just what I did to giv… Read More
2017-08-23 17:09
A few days past the Great American Eclipse, I’m feeling my way through the sheer joy, possible meanings, and wild vitality of this experience. An eclipse holds and moves through many m… Read More
2017-08-09 22:23
Yup, this is the photo that will wrap around the book cover. Thanks to Daniel and Ken Lassman for taking it together.My posts are fewer and further apart at the same time that I’ve bee… Read More
2017-07-31 03:02
Our local food co-op, the veritable Community Mercantile, just celebrated its marvelous school garden project at West Junior High School and the person who founded the project and has given… Read More
2017-07-31 03:02
Our local food co-op, the veritable Community Mercantile, just celebrated its marvelous school garden project at West Junior High School and the person who founded the project and has given… Read More
2017-07-12 05:21
It is 12:04 a.m., and I”m writing this from our back deck where I sit cross-legged in a chair and stare up at two enormous trees. The wind pours wave after wave through the tree to my… Read More
2017-07-10 04:18
It’s called “putting the book to bed” when you turn in your final version of a whole bunch of pages about to be published as a real, live book. Ten minutes ago, I put Follo… Read More
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