NEWS

  • My solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, continues its North Country tour with two newly-scheduled spring performances. Spread the word! Friday, May 6, 8:00pm Stafford Center Theatre, Clinton Community College Plattsburgh, New York Admission is free, but tickets are required and available on a first come, first served basis. Tickets may be obtained at

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  • I don’t understand why Hollywood insists on marketing movies by comparing them to other movies: “It’s Die Hard meets 2001: A Space Odyssey!” “It’s this year’s Shindler’s List!” Well, I do understand why, but I don’t like the idea that the only way to describe something positively is to compare it to something else that

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  • A Blue Ribbon

    I’m proud and more than a little bit humbled that my poem, “The Undefended Border,” has won the 2011 Founder’s Prize from RHINO, a Chicago-based poetry journal and collective. I’ve admired their work from afar for a while now; I don’t get to Chicago too often, but their furious poetic activity certainly makes me wish

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  • I’ve been thinking a lot about ekphrasis (the fancy word for a poem responding to a work of art), and it’s led to me wonder whether poetry is as fundamentally a product of input (what a poet sees, hears, reads, and absorbs from the world around them) as of output (the actual writing and revising).

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  • In Good Company

    The word “inertia” has a negative ring, but I like the idea of remaining at rest unless changed by a external force, which is how my dictionary defines it. The writing life is something like that — doing time at the desk until some mysterious, meaningful force finally shows up to make the work worthwhile.

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  • Merci!

    Thanks to old friends and new friends who came out this weekend for performances of Piecework: When We Were French in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and to my hosts in both towns. Thanks also to everyone who has sent messages in the wake of those performances with their responses to the show.

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  • My solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, continues its life on the road this month with two new performances. If you’re near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, I hope you’ll come see the show at the St. Johnsbury School on Saturday, January 29 at 7:30pm. I used to live in St. Johnsbury, and I’m looking forward

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  • Buying a 3-month membership to Ancestry.com might be the closest I’ve ever come to going on a bender. There is something about genealogy that I find positively addictive. Each ancestral coupling leads backwards to another and another, like cells dividing. Recovering the path between us and our ancestors is like reading a mystery novel, and

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  • It was pleasure enough to share a poutine with artist and performer James Bewley during his recent visit to Montreal, but I also had the opportunity to chat with his alter-ego, Dale Seever, about Tim Horton’s, Celine Dion, and my own solo show, Piecework: When We Were French. Dale is a born entertainer, an unsinkable

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  • Rain keeps falling but stops being rain. Umbrellas fold up flowers against frost.

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