Category Archives: Updates

The Old Man smiled at the precocious three year old serving him a beer in the backyard gathering after the funeral. She worked the group like a skilled barmaid, knew her cans and brands, remembering faces and orders without a … Continue reading →

Listen to the trees. Give them your eyes and skin. Let the wind be your interpreter, and though you won’t understand exactly what they’re saying, you will know they’re voices do not lie as they move like beasts breathing, cat … Continue reading →

are all of us drawn to heartbreaking stories? do we all love to empathize with others’ pains struggles, anxieties? stories of loss injustice and death strangely satisfy me black comfort food for my soul tortured? no, haunted? maybe, clinical? if … Continue reading →

I’ve been badgered into it, the hole, the pit, a basement cleaning project seventeen years in the making. I begin vacuuming cobwebs overhead insulating the floor joists. Unfinished basements are nests, attics underground. Plastic garbage bags and cans brim with … Continue reading →

His shaved bullet head bobs up and down as he bends to rinse glasses. The tee shirt tight on his bulging wide shoulders, a bar rag slung over one collar bone, the Screamin’ Orphans serenading from speakers overhead. He recites … Continue reading →

Walking across the campus of the University of Montana with a group of summer camp writers, ten year-olds, we stop to view the sculpture I’ve passed maybe a hundred times before, an iron cone topped with a wild, wavy shock … Continue reading →

Ed Lahey was the king of Montana poetry for me, and I really wanted to meet him. So, reluctantly, I made the effort to go introduce myself, intrude upon his privacy. He lived desperately alone. Ed invited me in under … Continue reading →

My son did one of those Pollack dribble paintings on cardboard, a masterpiece of texture, color, and warp. I stuck it on the basement wall. What is art? Throw shit and see what sticks . . . throw hard enough … Continue reading →

Light on landscape is art if someone sees it that way. Sound is music to those who hear it, the heater fan’s whir backed up by Dylan and the engine’s purr, maybe your voice joining the choir in your head … Continue reading →

Mongo waltzes whiskey barrels up a plank- ramp into the old, barn-red Dodge coupe’s trunk. His crouch-n’-dig stance like a lineman pushing a blocking sled or a lumper lift- grunting a gun safe up a staircase one riser-bump thrust at … Continue reading →