Yooooo it’s a pants-on-head bonkers day but hopefully you’re all doing okay nonetheless. A very quick writerly update:

Recent publications: Three poems out this week: “Patina of a Well-Rained Street” (in Petrichor’s Pebbles section) and “Throwing Signs” and “Tighten to Bruise” (Pictura Journal), online or in pdf, along with an author interview.

Currently reading: The Mirror Visitor Quartet by French author Christelle Dabos, translated by Hildegarde Serle. These are silly but very well-done post-cataclysm/coming-of-age/magician-learning-their-abilities YA novels. I’m just at the beginning of the fourth (and final) book. The story itself is fun, but most of the charm is in the sentence-level observations, and the bonkers world-building of floating arks over an apparently dead Earth containing different families with different magical powers and different treacherous politics.

_{Title is from “Even Bees Know What Zero Is” by Christian Wiman.}

Just a super quick note. Things are getting pretty sticky, aren’t they? Some stuff to do about all that. I’ve been reading a lot of detective stories¹, because it’s reassuring to spend time with problems that are solvable, but I also just finished Chin-Sun Lee’s Upcountry, which was rather dark but very readable. Recommended. And I had the shortest of shorts published today: “Lightyears From Home” at 50-Word Stories. Hope you all enjoy it!

_{¹Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham, though I’ll warn you that occasionally they lean pretty hard into being mid-20th Century British people with all the jingoism and racism that implies.}

_{²Title is the first sentence of the story linked above.}

_{³Click “view this email online” below and you can comment at the bottom! Everything is public so take appropriate precautions if you want to say wildly intemperate things about our new god emperor.}

Recently on my website: Some current events/stuff to do on my website, with some non-news fun, like Rita Moreno & Animal doing “Fever.” Also, Dave and I really leaned into the Canuckistan activities by attending the Dartmouth Ice Sculpture Festival.

Currently reading: Just finished Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, a fun golden age detective story, aside from one jarring single-paragraph reminder of racist colonialist thought.

Currently writing: I’m 36,000 words into a ghost/vampire novel that’s also a meditation on loneliness. I’ve been spending some of my spare time playing with erasure poems, the physicality of which feel like a rebellion against the gen-AI slop being forced on us. Also, an acceptance from Enchanted Garden Haiku for April.

Yoooo. Thanks for signing up for my newsletter! I’ll try to keep these relatively short and useful.

Recent publication: “Easy Bake” at The Baltimore Review.

Recently on my website: I’ve started a monthly round-up of interesting, useful, hilarious, or explanatory links. I’ll do a new one each month and update regularly, so it’s worth bookmarking and revisiting. So far this month: a bunch of news, Zillow toilets, poisoning AI slop with .ass titles, and how to make edible geodes.

Currently reading: Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (Soho Press), kind of the opposite of Miss Marple.

Recommended reading: “Love Was This Alone” by David Lerner Schwartz (New Orleans Review), a well-observed short.