Field Recordings

Marie Gauthier of Tupelo Press selected one of my poems, "Love in Reverse" for Thirty Days : The best of the 30/30 Project Year One.   It's one of a few anthologies to feature my work (cue haughty accent, spotlight, espresso, and French cigarettes). Hopefully you'll be hearing more from me over the next few months as projects near completion. Thanks for the support.

Warning: Spoiler alert. Fury Road is buzzing. Easily one of the best action films of the decade, or the action film of the decade, critics have been ringing up its “live stunt” merits, its ingenious action sequences, and its feminist core. But what exactly makes Fury Road so effective? To put it simply, it’s the writing. Yes, film writing is only part of the success, you have to actual film what you write, right? And act it, and so forth... Fury Road is a successful Film (with a capital F) because the writers do not pander to the groundlings. George Miller, Brendan McCarthy (known for comics and TV work), and Nico Lathouris (an actor/ TV writer who had a bit part in the original Mad Max ) craft a world without Basil Exposition. If you are prone to long bathroom breaks you just might miss an image crucial to the plot. Is this a groundbreaking filmmaking technique, to let the pictures do the talking? Hardly. Just one rarely used in Hollywood. Hollywood likes to scaffold ...

The fine staff of the Good Men Project selected one of my poems this month. You can read it here . I don’t know if I channel Thoreau or not, but I was certainly thinking of an adventure at Walden Pond in college. We’d hit Concord by train, a short ride from Boston. We hiked the rails back, and crossed over into the park and stayed the night. Hollering and looping like fools in the moon and brisk fall air. Ah, good times. This poem isn't about that. That's a different poem. This poem is about chores and finding some connection to earth. Working on the lyric. That's all. A song in minor key. Peace.

Writing is a discipline, and like a muscle requires exercise.  Good writing is good thinking, or so the saying goes.  This Friday, December 12th, at 3:00 PM, Pocomoke High School welcomes four local authors to read from their work, and celebrate the written word. Best selling author David Poyer, romance writer Joan Lablanc, Dr. Henry Maxson, and Claudia Young will read from their work to commemorate the opening of Pocomoke High School's Writing Center, 1817. 1817 (the number address of the school's facilities) is a staffed writing center that aims to help students develop and hone writing skills. The center aims to help students be more successful on high stakes testing, but teaching the craft of writing eclipses standardized testing, and focuses on thinking and processing skills that will allow the student to be more successful in college, and in their career field. The skills required to be a successful writer are developed over a lifetime.  Samuel Taylor Coleridg...

Inspired by true events, and family myth, this poem romances, satirizes, and questions gender and military machismo. I originally wrote it as an "adventure" poem, a narrative tale, but eventually became a discourse about the tale itself.  You can find the gender bending Civil War poem here  on The Good Men Project.

Some of my new work has been published on Synesthesia , C.H. Gorrie's baby, which is published on ISSUU, a new publishing format. You can read my work in the section that begins on this  page . Cursor or thumb ahead five pages to "Sleeper Agent Love Letter," and "Spoon is Me." Happy autumn!

Photo source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks This article is part of a series of investigations, reflections, and reminiscences by writers, artists, and musicians who were influenced by David Lynch’s seminal television show Twin Peaks . To read more, or to learn about participation, visit  www.twinpeaksproject.com . TIME TO RETURN TO TWIN PEAKS Early this week, David Lynch and Mark Frost announced that they would continue exploring the forests of Twin Peaks on Showtime in 2016. Depending on the success of the Showtime series, further Twin Peaks productions would no doubt be discussed. Perhaps even a re-boot. This article was written three months prior to the recent Lynch/Frost news of a new series. Twin Peaks has secured itself in the western TV canon for its chthonic descent into the self, into the Black Lodge, and into absurdity. Its recent Blu-ray re-release has the cult fav being watched by a whole new generation of fans. With recent cable TV masterpie...