27 June 2026 Let this be the first of a series of little tales about my life in Rural NC and my daily run-ins with the wilderness that surrounds me. Not sure when it happened—maybe it solidified in my mind sometime yesterday but had been stewing for weeks, or months, before then. In late August of last year, after over two decades of moving every two years for the military, we made our final move (we hope) into our “forever” (tongue-in-cheek) home: a lake house in rural North

The Craft of Middlemarch: Possibilities for Third Person Omniscient How do I start this? So, apparently, Mary Ann Evans lived for over two decades with a married man? Did y’all know this? She lived in the home of a married man as his “conjugal partner” while his wife also lived there and then stayed with him through his wife moving in with another man. This from Wikipedia. I was just sitting here, about to begin my book review, and I thought, “gee, I should probably know a

Middlemarch: On Eliot and Reading qua Education--Whether Non-AI writing is "Elitist" These two concepts are so entangled in my mind right now: Middlemarch and literacy. I’ve been reading Middlemarch for nearly four months and am finally about to finish, during a time when my own literacy has faltered, a time when I can distinguish which of my Creative Writing students are readers, a time when culture claims that our education system is failing us, a time when a friend has tol

2 June 2026 Preamble, I guess: Before I share this poem, it may be helpful to know a few things. First, although this reads as an elegy, it is not. My father lives in upstate New York. He is a very active person, a civil engineer, but of late he has been unable to do some of the activities he once loved, as he is battling the most aggressive of cancerous brain tumors: glioblastoma. Luckily, he was a member of a very successful (for him) immunotherapy trial which you can read

I planted a tree today. Angry. Just one of innumerable activities I’d choose over reading a tech bro’s manifesto justifying heuristics in writing —intellectual laziness— although my belief in intellectual rigor as a virtue is on chapped and crumbling ground. I planted two trees today and attempted to ignore the bracken-concealed discarded “For Sale” sign; the empty, smashed, label-less, 20oz green plastic Sprite bottle; and the deteriorating wooden picnic table down the hil