Archive • Missive • Buttondown

Sonora 🌵🌞

MW at the gallery Turbulence! What a bouncy road! What joys and hard leaving 🛶 We drove the whole way down the coast with the car packed as full of five...

Moving /Violations ✖️

Okay Lovelies, First let’s welcome the newcomers 🥂 You make the place better just by turning up; a joy to have you here. But to business… An Invitation...

Lucca, Spring Dears, There are three big things we need to discuss right up front before we get to the goodies: 1️⃣ Image is alright! The community came...

Gains, losses 📈

Dear ones, 🧚🏻 I've just had the most exhilarating conversation with Ben Palpant for Rabbit Room: it's part origin story and part advice for new writers. It's...

Year in Review 2023 🤵🏼‍♂️

December 31, 2023

Dear friends, 2023 was a whopper, a walloper, as anyone whose been paying attention will have noticed. For most of my friends, for one reason or another,...

Give it away 🎁

December 4, 2023

Hello friends, Camp Casey, Whidbey Island By chance, by grace, and last minute, we were allowed to stay up at Camp Casey on Whidbey for the Thanksgiving...

Light saving 🔦

November 3, 2023

Well, it's broken. Remember when I fell on the stairs and thought I cracked a rib and while checking it out, they found my bursting appendix? Well I also...

Wise and Wherefore's 🫧

August 25, 2023

Dear friends, It's about to get wild over at ours as my school's beginning tries to time with my kids'. Before the year begins in earnest, then, here are a...

More light 🌤

Happy Summer, friends! We're adrift amidst a sea of changes around here: the new baby, a new leadership structure at the university, a new direction for our...

She's here! Cicely Rose was born on April 10th, and she is healthy and happy and sweet as a peach. What a wonder! What a waiting! And how very worth it. I am...

Spirit in the Sky 🪘

Chers amies et amis, We have come through the worst of winter, which was, as ever in the Pacific Northwest, relatively tame. We've had our second to last...

Year in Review 2022

December 30, 2022

I used to watch a TV show as a kid called Beyond 2000, which imagined what the world would be like in the new millennium. We were, to put it mildly, both...

Under the Wire ☃

December 1, 2022

Alright friends, It looks as if there’s time for one last missive before my annual Year-in-Review post. We’ve just returned from a paradisal Thanksgiving on...

Oh, Britannia 🇬🇧👑

September 12, 2022

Beloveds, I was traveling in England during the last weeks of Elizabeth's reign; this is something that turns out to have been true, though there's no way I...

I'll fly away 🛫

August 16, 2022

Alright you lovelies, I write this on the morning of my departure for England with the study abroad group; I wanted to send an update beforehand because I...

Three to Get Ready 🛣

Dear friends, In a couple of days, my family will climb the proverbial staircase, look around in the blazing summer sun, inhale, and slide down the coast....

Online Reading TOMORROW 👨‍💻

Don't get too excited now. This is not the fulsome missive you might have expected (might even have deserved)--that is coming, and soon. This is merely the...

My friends! Well the gallery show in LA was a hit! In one of those strange twists my life sometimes takes, I found myself at a bottle-service-only rooftop...

The up! The coming! 🧳

Dear ones, In a way, it's nice to have a bookend, a talisman, a fin at the end of a film. The first thing the pandemic cancelled for me was the launch party...

Candle smoke 🎂

January 24, 2022

Dear friends, Well, I got COVID the first week of 2022. Inauspicious beginnings, you might say, but I'm glad to be done with it (and glad I didn't have to...

Year in Review 2021 📆

December 31, 2021

Oh my dears! The world so changed! Fewer things of note happened this year that might have: I threw fewer parties, attended fewer conferences, gave no public...

November 29, 2021

Dear ones, First, this is a place on the earth and I live here. I just wanted to point that out. Then, let's see, I went to Boston for Lilly and saw my good...

I've Got You Now

October 1, 2021

Wait a second, can it really have been that long? We haven't had a missive since Spring? Goodness. I've missed you all. I want to go back and tell you the...

Round tones 🎧

People! I’ve been blessed to have articulate blurbs for my books from people I admire, James K.A. Smith, Scott Cairns, Malcom Guite, to name only the most...

Peter and the Whale 🐋

If I feel close to this animal, it’s because I helped dig up its bones. They weren’t ready yet, having only cured in the soil for eight or so months and...

How the Sausage, and new Digs!

Well, well, well. How the time gets away, no? Here’s what’s happened since last we communed: I attended my first residency as a poetry mentor in SPU’s...

Children's books that don't make you want to 🤮

February 18, 2021

Hello dear ones, I've missed you these last weeks, and have much to share, as usual, but rather than launch spectacularly into the cultural and writerly...

Taking down the Tinsel

January 13, 2021

My Dears, How is there always so much happening? Every time I sit down to pen you a missive, I think O, I’ll just jot a short note and then am interrupted...

Spout (off) v.2 🌬

December 7, 2020

NB- some of you will have seen this update already. I tried a different email distributor and it was a disaster. Here then is the email you should have...

The Fall Steals 🍁

October 10, 2020

Well well well. Autumn is creeping down from the tops of the trees which gold there first and it has almost fallen, before rains come and fell all the leaves...

Wild Ride-ICYMI 🎢

September 1, 2020

Hello Dear Ones, I have been coming back, if not to normalcy–it’s too soon for a word like that–at least to some familiar rhythms these last weeks. I’ve been...

September 1, 2020

Hello Dear Ones, I have been coming back, if not to normalcy--it's too soon for a word like that--at least to some familiar rhythms these last weeks. I've...

Alright friends. Here’s what’s up: First, my family took a road trip to Arizona. It was our first such outing of—if the sitcoms are to be believed—what will...

Hang in there 🚠

Okay Lovelies, How are we doing? This extrovert is crumpling up without the sunlight of daily interactions, though I am blessed to have a yard with which to...

A Mediated Reading 🖥️ ...tomorrow!

Lovelies, It will not surprise those of you who know me well that I will take the analog over the digital any day: real lectures over online, real letters...

"Happy" Saint Patrick's Day ☘️

Dear ones, This is an uncertain and difficult time to be sure, or perhaps it is only a more clearly uncertain and difficult time than we are wont to face,...

🪐 The Elegy Beta has landed 🪐

It’s here! 🍾 After nearly ten years in process, The Elegy Beta hits bookstores Today! I started writing the elegies in September 2010 and now they’ll be in...

Ignition Sequence

February 27, 2020

Dear ones, You can pre-order The Elegy Beta right now‼️ I can’t tell you how strange it feels to say that. This thing that has been puzzled over and prayed,...

Elegy Beta Cover Reveal

January 30, 2020

Dear ones, I'm not sure this is completely finalized, but I can't keep the lid on this. We have a cover for The Elegy Beta! As I think I mentioned in my...

Year in Review 2019

December 30, 2019

2019 Obviously, every day is significant in its own way, but when I look back on 2019, here are some milestones, way-markers, cairns to memorialize the too-...

November 5, 2019

Lovelies, Why is the new book called The Elegy Beta you ask? Well, that's a fine question. You always ask such astute and piercing questions. The title...

The Elegy Beta Book Announcement!!!

September 6, 2019

My second poem book is coming soon! The fine folks at Mockingbird are publishing it. I couldn’t be more pleased. Awhile ago on twitter, someone asked a group...

Alright To start things off, here is a preview of a documentary film about my wife’s ballet Apex. It’s showing now through September at the San Juan Islands...

The people! First, there are a lot of new subscribers here; would you all mind making them feel welcome? Man, have some things been happening. I don’t know...

People, Alas and alack! That SAT essay I was telling you about in my last newsletter is finished but the editors are still sitting on it. I’ll have to link...

Hello Lovelies, It’s a fine Spring shaping up here in Seattle: tulips dropping their opulent heads, the cherries flowering and falling, the light stretching...

Hi (especially new) friends! It happened! Who knows how long it will stay, but Spring has pounced on Seattle and we’re all dizzy from the blow. Let us steady...

December 31, 2018

Dear ones, Thus concludes a year, another full of mirth and myrrh. When I cast the sidelong glance, here are the peaks topping the geography: This was the...

Leaves- Sibylline, Autumnal and Otherwise

September 26, 2018

The People! I don't want to press too hard on your graces, bestrewing news and updates, suggestions for cultural refinements about your patch with the...

After this charade

August 17, 2018

Dear ones, Summer in Seattle has mostly passed and we Willetts have made appropriate oblations, with a trip to Friday Harbor so Mrs. Willett could go whale-...