Thanks to Decorah News.com’s Ben Gardner (my former Paideia student!) for this lovely story about Eldorado, Iowa and how it came to be.
Read moreThe Cheapskate Intellectual
A journey through matters of spirit, sustainability, and self-reliance
“Top Five Articles About Dads:” Orion Magazine Features “Gaze Upon This World”
I’m so honored that Orion Magazine has featured my essay “Gaze Upon This World,” which appeared in its Spring 2018 issue, in its feature “Father’s Day: Top Five Articles About Dads.” The piece is print-only, but here’s an excerpt from the beginning: I’m biking through the dark in the smoky chill of October. Overhead, a […]
Read more“Looking Like Keats” Workshop: A student’s account.
Here’s a lovely account by fellow writer Martyn Crucefix of my workshop “Looking Like Keats: Observation and Inspiration for Your Writing” at the Keats House in Hampstead on May 25. Brother John, as we affectionately called him, was looking down on us from this portrait, hanging in the Chester Room, the whole time – and […]
Read moreProtection. Rebellion. Incarnation.
Easter Sunday, 2019. Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square. Extinction Rebellion and Brexit and Eucharist. Two hundred years on from Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” and Keats’ Odes. What if this is the site of Incarnation, here and now? parliament square easter sunday Carn, the root: meat, flesh. Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. […]
Read moreFighting the fight, right here.
“[We] never turn sentimental about something of real value — wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy — until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer affectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough.” – Hal Crowther My boxing […]
Read moreMy first novel: welcome to the world.
Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
Read moreWe have a cover!
With thanks to Robert Hand and the team at Bowen Press Books and to the students of my first-session “Writing in London” class, who offered comments on previous versions that have been incorporated here. Can’t wait to see it in book form.
Read morePowering up in Kings Cross.
At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
Read more“What will survive of us is…”
Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
Read moreRIP: Diana Athill.
The great and graceful writer Diana Athill has just passed away, age 101. Here’s a piece I wrote about her for the literary site BLOOM (about writers and other artists who come into their prime after age 40). Diana Athill: The Sufficient Self
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