Some Saturday in late September, I was determined to finish Kristin Lavrandatter. I had about 200 pages left – an amount that doesn’t seem like much given that the book is 1,124 pages – and I would crank them out in 48 hours, along with a few essays if it was the last thing I did. It was barely the… View Post

My rumination over and response to some of the concepts explored in “The End of High-School English,” is live on TS Poetry Press today. You’ll read about my fascination with email, a sort of prank my friend Alison and I pulled in college so that we could check said email, and you’ll read about the saddest and most beautiful book… View Post

For my Darling Files entry this month, I am sharing an essay I wrote as an example of a character analysis when I was teaching 8th grade English, and another one I wrote on the same character about 20 years later. 2004 I become nervous and tense when I think about Aunt Alexandra in To Kill A Mockingbird. This is… View Post

Advent calls us to wait with expectation, to notice and attend to the mysterious, to sit in the dark. And maybe this is how it’s supposed to be, but against this call is the rush, the demand, the stress to finish all the things while making them pretty (read: Instagrammable), too. I think I have to live at a slower… View Post

Harper and I are in the car on a Friday morning under a grey sky that’s sending soft snowflakes like cherry blossoms that flew off the trees’ branches every April in Washington DC. “It’s a pink day!’ Harper proclaimed that morning in her blue dress, her blue shoes with the jaguar print because she loved Diego and Baby Jaguar, and… View Post