Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” was on the radio…again. Billie Joe Armstrong’s love song to the pain he’s endured since his father’s death from cancer is a perennial staple on independent radio…
The Weather
September means faculty meetings and preparation for students at my little boarding school in the Adirondacks. It also means I’m winding down my online teaching and tutoring for the summer. The other night, during my…
Drawing Inspiration
I’ve been on an ART BOOK kick this summer. I bought four books: one about sketching and three others about illustrating journals and collage work. I found them at a little shop along Lake Champlain,…
Lit Mag Love: Eirinie Carson
I’ve written about how my perspective about grief shifted dramatically when I lost my baby. O. was sixteen, my younger boy, and watching him slip away was terrifying. Living without him is like having a…
Lit Mag Love: Eileen Vorbach Collins
This Lit Mag Love is all about writer Eileen Vorbach Collins. Damn, she’s prolific and so good. I came across her award-winning piece in Lunch Ticket. It reminded me of the bins I have in…
Lit Mag Love: Ben Sandman
I know some people don’t like epistolary pieces, but I almost always do. This is a series of emails from a novelist on a deadline who’s moved to a new apartment with his wife, a…
Lit Mag Love: Casey Mulligan Walsh
I found writer Casey Mulligan Walsh in the June 2022 issue of Split Lip, where she lives up to their mission: We’re a literary journal that’s totally bonkers-in-love with voice-driven writing, pop culture, and the…
One for the Murphys
Even though North Country School had to shut down a little early because of that thing that begins with “c” and ends with “d”, the sixth graders and I were able to read One for…
Lit Mag Love: Nikki Schulak
My Lit Mag Love posts are all about finding treasures when I immerse myself in the hundreds of literary magazines online. I submitted a piece to Porcupine Literary, a magazine for and by teachers, but…
Published: Oh Reader
Grief and growth take center stage in The Third Mushroom, a middle-grade novel by the talented Jennifer L. Holm that serves as a follow-up to The Fourteenth Goldfish, a book I shared with my first…