Give it away 🎁
Hello friends,
By chance, by grace, and last minute, we were allowed to stay up at Camp Casey on Whidbey for the Thanksgiving holiday. We brought some friends and even some family for the celebration (subdued though it sometimes was by all of us trading around an illness day-by-day 🤧). But it was nice to share with them finally this place where our little family has such deep ties. The whole thing made me feel grateful for everything, even the storms we're weathering just now, which is I suppose what Thanksgiving is for.
Publications
Here's my new essay about The Karate Kid 🥋 and the Merchant of Venice over at Mockingbird. Really, it's about kenosis, or about mercy. Really, it's about reading. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
Miyagi raises his hand for a classic karate chop, growling from his dan tien to summon the power that we know can break clean through sheets of solid ice — what might that hand do to a man’s face? — only to stop the flood at the last moment, like some angel disarming a would-be sacrificer on the mountain.
And I had a fab talk with my friends John and Kathy at WORD-FM and I read for them (for you!) two poems about light, 🌤️ one from Alica Ostriker and a new one of mine. Listen here.
My new book is cruising right along and I really can't wait to share these new poems. They're crazy. I don't know whether to call them a new direction or a natural evolution, but they feel markedly different to me somehow. The collection is about 3/4 complete and will hopefully be ready to go looking for publishers around the new year. Exciting! 😄
Reading
The new Best American Poetry 2023 just came out and it's a good one. They aren't always, but this one is.
Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind tells, movingly and among other things, about the historian's time in Oxford, meeting C.S. Lewis, and reading Brideshead Revisited, which is to say: catnip for me. There's tons of reviews of the book out already, but this is my favorite.
Speaking of great writing, I loved this essay about "The Susan Problem" over at Heart of Flesh, and this one about museum-going by Matt Milliner, and this one about loving Michigan, which is a thing I do not do, but almost want to, after this. Oh, and this one about Wizard of Oz; what a generous act of criticism! A lovely time for essays, that is.
Oddments
Look at these beautiful paintings by Mark Thompson over at the Gibson Gallery.
And here's two pieces of news in one: there's a hot new press you may want to know about, Wildhouse, that's just had their inaugural chapbook contest won by SPU MFA grad Julie Sumner and her book Meridian. Come to the online launch party feat. Scott Cairns, Bob Cording, Mark Burrows on 12/6 at 9pm EST.
That's it. This is a brief note to say that I'm thinking about you all and wish you a blessed Advent season (which, let's remember, is a season of joyful anticipation and not glum introspection 🎄). #Rejoiceisacommand
We'll chat again soon when I ring on to share my Year-in-Review. Until then, be well, and read Festus.