Autobiography in Five Sentences

It’s Day 2 of my January Retreat here in Little Blue. Every morning, I give a short prompt best done long-hand. Today’s was inspired by Melissa Febos, a brilliant writer…

Now and Then

Sing to me, Muse, of complicated men
Take me down to the ground floor, 
Repossess my all-access pass

Mustard Seeds and the Newport Folk Festival

Nerissa & Katryna and the Falling Down Barn in 2007 I have sudden and severe laryngitis. I can no longer yell at my kids. In fact, I feel myself to…

Back at the Fruit Tree

Phillip Price of the Winterpills (and formally of the Maggies) once said to me that every time he got an idea for a song he wrote five different versions of…

I Choose This Era

Here is me playing the acoustic part. This song is actually the oldest song on the CD. I wrote it a couple of weeks before my daughter was born, and…

Dreaming of the Dead

(My grandmother) Last night I had a dream about my grandfather, a man who died in 1981 at the age of 66 from esophageal cancer. When he died, I was…

Why An Artist Needs to Write Fiction, Even When There Are No Marshmallows

Do you remember the marshmallow experiment of the 60s? Briefly, some researchers nabbed a bunch of 4-year-olds and put them in a room together. Each child was given a marshmallow…

October Snowstorm

It’s one of the many paradoxes of life that by the time we really become convinced that we want to–need to–change, it’s too late. Not to be a downer; but…

The Coat

As I have written previously, I made a vow last December to make peace with money. I decided to let the ways in which I interact with the currency of…