Moving yet again!

I tried out wordpress.com for a few months, but quickly decided that I had a much better time using my own server. Head on over to textural.org.

The Moon Incident

Many moons ago, I published a small chapbook of poems titled The Moon Incident through my friend Andrew’s small press (Seaweed Sideshow Circus). Many of the poems were taken from my graduate thesis along with a few newer pieces. I like working on themes even if the poems individually have their own moment. While I was in school, I was studying liturgical prayers and their history and decided to write some poems from them. Specifically the “Glory Be…” antiphonal prayer that’s often recited in Catholic and Anglican liturgies became a whole series, each line or phrase having a poem of its own.

The 200 Books Project

My good friend Hannah Stoney and I have undertaken an ambitious reading project we started calling The 200 Books Project. We spent weeks trying to come up with a list of novels that would take us through the canon. It was pretty funny actually; if only someone would have seen us as we spent hours combing through Wikipedia. (Who the heck is Nevil Shute?)

Our combined list culled from all sorts of authoritative and not-so-authoritative readers lists of “best novels ever”, and so we wound up with many science fiction, detective and crime novels, several by one author. I’d say, judging by readers’ best-of lists, that science fiction is the most widely read fiction.

Yes, I’m Lefthanded

Yes, I’m lefthanded. I’m the only lefty in my family, including cousins, aunts and uncles. (Although I haven’t been able to keep track of my mother’s family; she had 9 brothers and sisters and I am still accumulating new cousins and second cousins every year.) Like many lefties, I grew up thinking there was a special reason for this oddity. When I started playing softball, for some reason I batted right-handed, until my father told me, “You should really try to bat left-handed, you’d be stronger at it.” And I did, thinking that I could have the special skill of the tricky switch-hitter.

Thanks for stopping by.

If you were a visitor of shookfoil.org, thank you. It had many lives, first as a website devoted to essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet on whom I wrote a graduate thesis. Then it was a place for essays. All this before blog software came around. Then it became an art blog. It just never found what it wanted to be, never put down roots. But in the back of my mind, I always needed a potential blank page as an author and writer.

This was my last post on Shookfoil, reprinted not just for posterity but to say, welcome to I’m Lefthanded: