“We often hear the word quirky applied to contemporary poets (just glance at five random blurbs, you’re sure to find quirky), but perhaps no one writing today inhabits the word quite as fully…

“Because you’re in a hurry and there’s no time for research, you re-invent the street names in downtown Portland, or pretend to have inside information on the corporate structure and jargon of the…

“Love is strange and calls me to stranger things/When I was young I thought that I’d know why./I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”—Luke Hankins Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South…

“Reader, pause here. What followed was, and remains, an utterly unique experience in my life. This was no shop girl waving strips of scented blotting paper, hawking mass-produced aromas in a mall. This…

“I still struggle every day to find meaning in a universe without meaning. Whom shall I serve? For now, I can serve individuals and society by teaching and acting as if a single…

“I still have the stained and faded green notebook in which I wrote all the recipes, 96 in all, beginning with velouté de volaille (cream of chicken soup) on October 23rd and finishing…

“As a trumpet player, I can recall a few stand-out moments of inspiration in my formative years. One was listening to Miles Davis perform the most profound solo on the song “My Funny…

“How wonderful that our editor suggested this theme for our first columns of 2018. How timely! For, as I write, the Legion of Honor, a museum in San Francisco, has a segment of…

“As they age, both women and men now become less visible, if at different rates and to different degrees. (It is likely that those egotistical and misogynistic men who aggressively deny that this…

“Reading Leigh Fermor’s exquisite prose, about a variety of subjects that I loved, stirred my own lesser and corporate repressed creative juices. This was a man who, when writing about the ‘long eclipsed’…