How is it that Billy Collins always knows just what to say to make me smile? (from The Writer’s Almanac, April 17, 2009). Field Guide by Billy Collins No one I ask knows the name of the flower we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick and that I point to [...]

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The Feb. 9-16th issue of The NewYorker has a fascinating essay, Another Country, by Claudia Roth Pierpont about James Baldwin’s trip to Istanbul in the early 1960s. There is a new book out about this journey and about his later life (James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska) that the essay essentially reviews– a [...]

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That’s me, second from the right, in the blue vest and (of course) tennis shoes. Me and the other boys from my Sunday School class, circa 1979–thirty years ago, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in El Cajon, California. My hair is so shiny blond, like a Breck Girl Ad. Here’s a memory: I was an acolyte [...]

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Sadly, Beverly Garland has died. As a kid I had hoped thought she was a long-lost sister of Judy Garland. But, I learned later, she was not. She was a B-Horror Movie Queen, a prolific television actress –the first policewoman on television (some of you younger kids might remember her from Scarecrow and Mrs. King, [...]

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<–that’s our Turkey Soap Dispenser I just pulled a pumpkin cream pie out of the oven. I’m thankful for the coming new year. a year of change. A year of hope. A year of dazzling prolificacy. I’m also thankful for this: **this was one of those cheesy products advertised in the sidebar on Facebook. You [...]

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from The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins But mostly poetry fills me with the urge to write poetry, to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the tip of my pencil. How is it that Billy Collins knows just how I feel about writing?

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Funny. The last two nights when I was driving home at 7pm The Writer’s Almanac on NPR played the same show–which was about Augusten Burroughs (author of Running With Scissors, Dry, A Wolf at the Table…duh). It felt kind of like that movie, Groundhog Day, in fact, I had to check my cell phone to [...]

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Sunday night I saw poet Billy Collins read at DG Wills in La Jolla. DG Wills is one of the tiniest bookstores i’ve ever seen; it has used books, first editions, and black and white photos of writers and celebrities on the walls (like an autographed pic of 1950s beefcake, Samson and Delilah star Victor [...]

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Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know. The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity whiich you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as a necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging [...]

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It’s Oscar Wilde‘s birthday today. He was born in Dublin in 1854. I only know this because I get daily emails from The Writer’s Almanac– and you can too–click here. Every day I get a poem in my email, plus trivia and tidbits about writers born on that day. Here’s a great quote from him. [...]

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