Timothy Snyder‘s Our Malady: Lessons In Liberty from a Hospital Diary proved an excellent choice for my Medicine in Literature course at Luther this spring semester. Here, in a presentation for the virtual conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), I explain why.

A rerun from 2011 that’s been on my mind today. Merry Christmas, y’all. — “I’ve been a pastor for more than 15 years, and I am still amazed at folks in nursing homes, many unable to remember the majority of their own lives, who will begin to sing and nod and clap when they hear […]

Windblown leaf in my yard, Dec. 14, 2016.

Dear Cheapskate Readers: Sorry it’s been a little while – the summer got away from me a bit, and I have been working incessantly on the Giant Nonfiction Manifesto on Art, Technology, Politics, Gardening, Spirit, and Attention, of which you have all been reading bits and pieces here for some time.  In memory of B.K.S. […]

Still vacationing, friends, readers, and fellow cheapskates. (That’s me in the yellow ocean kayak.) Look for more posts when I begin processing my now-burgeoning tomatoes! Thanks, as ever, for your support and good cheer.

What you see here is the result of my past couple blogging-less weeks of garden work: several big and long-planned projects including the construction, priming, and painting of a new fence (to the far right, now completely enclosing the yard – other people built it and primed it, I painted it); weeding everything and trucking […]

Saw a kid dismally picking weeds out of a crack by a curb (obviously assigned by parent or other authority) and remembered a great FREE and ecologically sound tip for controlling those little bitty weeds that come up through cracks in pavement: boiling water. I used what was left in my canning pot to kill […]

Or, two ways of looking at a lawn.  (With another glass of wine I might be able to manage the standard thirteen….) Mower A: Mower B: Mower A: used, gas-powered Craftsman gifted to me by my brother-in-law, then traveled by circuitous routes involving broken promises of mower transit in an SUV by male family members […]

In the words of the great Candi Staton, self-preservation is what’s really going on today. Or what went on yesterday, for the first time ever in the Cheapskate Intellectual kitchen. But it won’t be the last. Following the directions in the super-easy and super-fun book CANNING FOR A NEW GENERATION, I rendered a colander full […]

This is me this past weekend, celebrating my summer self.  Gloriously, the season is shifting inside my head — the loosening and breathing and unconscious release of the anxious, trouble-borrowing, multitasking clench which I realize only in retrospect is my school-year norm.  And the shift is outside my head too.  Literally, right on top. Because […]