Anecdotal Evidence

I can’t listen to music while writing. For a break I might play the video of a song that had been nagging my memory. More often I’ll select ...

Once I dropped a copy of Ian Frazier’s The Fish’s Eye into a bathtub full of water. While reading a paperback of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope...

I’ve never consciously ranked coziness – the OED prefers cosiness -- high among the literary qualities I most admire in books and writers....

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art , a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculp...

From a biochemist I learned a phrase new to me – “epigenetic switching.” It means changes in gene expression without corresponding changes i...

I acknowledge that William Cowper never rises to the first rank of poets but his Poems (1931) in the Everyman’s Library edition – complete ...

At the bottom of a box of odds and ends I found a printout of an essay published more than eighteen years ago at a site called Truthdig. I d...