Every so often, I send a newsletter that is equal parts announcement and thoughtful sharing about my life as a writer and human. Below is an archive of those letters. If you'd like to sign up, click HERE.
A Call to Rest and Let in the Light
September 2025
Towards the end of August, I came across this series of memes from Instagram. Scrolling through, I felt a split-second of something like guilt. This was not a summer of writing for me in any form. In fact, it was a summer of pretty intentionally not writing, of stepping back from busyness and leaning into a real, well deserved break. Sure, I still threw my hat into the ring for a few upcoming writing residencies, I met regularly with my writing group to critique and discuss their writing, I enjoyed the community of Nina Lacour’s Summer Writing Nights and Chelsea DesAutels’s Summer Fridays Writing Club. And I did manage to eke out a single new poem, included below.
Thoughts on failure, success and wobbly bikes
June 2025
I’ve been embarrassed to write this newsletter. After three in a row announcing great things to come–my new life devoted to writing, a retreat in Pennsylvania, and a retreat in Greece—I’m standing here in the depths of what feels like incredible (and incredibly public) failure. My Pennsylvania retreat didn’t happen, and my retreat to Greece won’t either. I have been turned down by every writing contest I’ve entered. Ditto for about half the residencies I’ve applied to. No new publications so far. Perhaps worst of all, I have hardly written since winter ended.
March News
March 2025
Once, as my 2022-23 sabbatical was coming to a close, I tried counting how many places I had slept during my year off from teaching. Aside from my own bedroom in Southern Utah, there were the homes of family members who hosted me in Phoenix, my residency bedroom at Soaring Gardens in Pennsylvania, the bed I slept in on an ill-fated trip to Iceland that fall, my rented room in the Pink House in Flagstaff where I wintered, and the list went on and on…
I very quickly gave up on the endeavor of counting. It was too complicated. Did I count my niece’s bed, where I slept when I had Covid, as separate from my sister‘s bed, where I stayed while I watched her kids a few weeks later? Did I count the nights spent in the house behind the Pink House where I did some cat-sitting as separate from my rented bedroom in the Pink House itself? What about nights back home where I slept on the couch, the writing retreat where I tried out two different beds, my overnight stay on a series of benches at the Athens airport? How did I count each of those?
February News
February 2025
It's been almost three years since I was awarded a three-week residency at Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat in Laceyville, PA. It’s hard to fathom the significance of that residency in late summer of 2022, how it would come to mark such a massive turning point in my life. I was entering a teaching sabbatical that granted me the opportunity to devote myself full-time to writing. I couldn't possibly have known it when I got news of the residency that it was also destined to be a time of enormous upheaval in my personal life. Soaring Gardens became not only a sacred space for my writing, but also a very necessary refuge as my nineteen-year marriage inexorably (and inexplicably) fell apart. My excitement as I flew to PA near the end of August was very much tempered by that reality, by a sense of the unknown all around me. Uncertainty encroached on all my thoughts, dizzied my sleep at night, flickered at the edges of my vision. Like the protagonist in my novel, I felt haunted.
December News
December 2024
What is there to say about 2024? Like a lot of other years, I’m surprised that it’s nearly over, and like a lot of other people on this planet—and especially in this country—I’m surprised that I’ve survived (am surviving) (will continue to survive). The overall experience of 2024 has been similar to much of my adult life: highs and lows, mundane and magic, trials and errors and some stunning successes—along with a few (dozen) failures. But this year is unique. I started out teaching full-time, feeling a lot of joy and some ambivalence about my career, and I’m ending it in this self-employed space that feels an awful lot like unemployment.