(a word-play poem inspired by Brenda Shaughnessy's "Artless") Hopeless? If yes, where art you? How art you? How do you propose to fight, weaponless? Nay; armed with brush, clay, and words— not swords. So, hopeless? No! Feel the bite-like wound that winds into an affront, frontierless. Here are my knife, my harpy rapier, my iron might— not mightless! Not meek, but steel; art steals in cold to embolden meekness. The untold, forgotten weakness art seeks to quash, bre

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