​Waiting for my mug of lemon ginger tea to cool, I crawl into bed with 3 different books — Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch, Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and, world-renowned author and writing teacher, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It’s Sunday. I want these books...

​Easter is a day of emergence and resurrection. While quarantine is keeping us from physically emerging, I think we can find both of these freedoms inside the kitchen, if only we let ourselves  wander away from fixed recipes and follow the limitless intelligence of our...

​Why I write

Why you tie a balloon to a string —

To stay. To be.

To hold onto something:

A string of words,

taut with grammar’s gravity;

pulling down the up of the soul;

keeping life, gently, to the place, and

in the shape

of a hand.

A red balloon:

urgent yet delicate —

and diffic...

​CoronaVirus is a disaster unfolding fast: on our screens if we’re lucky, before our eyes if we wait long enough, and eventually in our bodies if we’re admitting to the reality of this disease. But it is, at the same time, infecting large groups of us with an essential...

​“Is there too much Kahlua?” It struck her as a strange question. She, for one, didn’t know a way to remove an ingredient from peaks of whipped cream, once it had already been incorporated. But she answered her daughter, anyway. After all, it was she who may have given...

Writing has felt like searching more than saying lately; morning pages, like probing for a light-switch, instead of illuminating with the mind. So I’ve sided with silence more often: cupped the child’s mouth, barring the reflex to linguify what I find. Instead, I’ve st...

When I was young, I’d take a small white ceramic bowl from the cupboard, intended for our pet rats, and start pulling out what ingredients from the fridge I craved: half a banana, a scoop of peanut butter (crunchy of course), some chocolate sauce, a sprinkling of grano...

​The corner of Michelle Obama’s Becoming pokes out of my charcoal suede book-bag, collapsed on the wooden bench of a downtown cafe. It’s not quite 11 a.m. and sweat is forming on my upper lip like dew on a morning leaf. A fan laboriously circulates the hot air so that...

The speed at which things pass is robbery. Poems flash like strobes of light below trees and then are gone.

For instance, on my way to St. Helena a cluster of Clydesdales stood grazing in a spring-green pasture. Beloved red bodies, glistening in the sun, slightly s...

Be quick with the details. They run fast like small children.

Seize them by the sleeve, hook their hood, grip a hand.

Grab hold of what you can, just firm enough to keep

that wriggling body from slipping into the deep.

Else they’ll shrink from their clothes and leave you a...