So I'm terrible at keeping this website up-to-date.  I'd rather write poems, submit poems, blab about poems online...  yeah, I still care about prose (and the YA fiction I've written), but lately, poetry has stolen my whole heart.

It always had it, really. I started writing poems when I was seven.  I wrote an elegy to JFK when he was murdered and sent it to Jackie.  I was eleven and one of her secretaries sent me a thank you letter.  At the time I felt a little embarrassed; it seemed such a childlike thing to have done and I wanted to be a grown-up even then.  But I think the impulse to write--to tell stores or form poems--IS childlike.  The "adulting" part is the po-biz.  Blog updating.  Wondering if I should move this whole show to Substack or something.  That stuff.

Oh--and poetry EDITING.  Cast your eyes leftwards.  I'm the new poetry editor at Eclectica Magazine.  They are a venerable online lit mag that also publishes travel pieces, fiction, and humor.  They were one of the first serious places I published back when they were starting out and I was still teaching poetry in the public schools--the better part of thirty years ago.  I'll let you know when the decisions I'll be starting to make this very afternoon go live--it'll be a little while, but I can't tell you how happy I am about this.  Eclectica's a solid mag that nominates for Pushcart and has a history of publishing really good people.

Also (but wait!  there's more!) you're probably reading this after the fact, but I'm the featured poet on Rattlecast--tomorrow night, June 23rd, eight EDT.

I've been on Rattlecast before, because I often manage to get a political commentary kinda poem in Rattle magazine's ongoing Poets Respond feature online.  Clicky click on the red-dy red to see the most recent one.  Editor TIm Green, bless him, decided to feature me this week.  So I'm not the warmup act anymore!  I have a bunch of poems, largely from Unforgetting, my most recent collection, that I'm going to read. You can get it at the 'Zon, or I should have a box of books from my publisher soon, and I'll sign one to you.

So yeah, I'm smiling. There's proof over to the right.  Also I copped out and cut my hair.  So it goes.

A few recent publications: Grain Magazine (from Canada!). That one is forthcoming.  Here's one from SWIMM about hearing Dizzy Gillespie in a place you wouldn't expect him to be. And here's a batch from Does It Have Pockets?  There's work forthcoming also from Tar River.  OH--and this dear-to-my-heart poem ran in ONE ART.  I'll leave you with a poem about my dearest ambition--being the winner of Fat Bear Week--from BOOTH Magazine.

Also, I grew my hair out, but I'm just about to lose patience with it.  Anyway, have a gander: the longest it's been in years.

Where have I been?  Good question.  Mostly, I've been writing poetry like a fiend, and submitting like a fiend.  I still haven't found a home for the chapbook that bears its name  but "All Our Houses Are The Same House" found a home in Amethyst Magazine lately.   Thimble also showed my poem "Home Renovation" some love. I also had a poem in Divot (you have to scoll down) called "Anyway."

To everything there is a season, and although I get ideas sometimes, the fiction has not been calling me.  Which is probably a good thing considering how much you sit down when you're writing fiction.  Poetry at least you get up and walk around some.  Shorter form, you know.

Ken and I stayed in New York this past summer; he was singing in the choir down at Riverside Church up by Columbia University in NYC during the warm months, and we wanted to eat the vegetables from our garden instead of leaving them for our cat sitters. And I worked with my brother, who is a local historian specializing in Bannerman's Island (an amazing place on the Hudson River, a bit north of here).  He's finishing a book about it.  So I haven't utterly abandoned prose--just taking a break from my own.

This is Bannerman's--over to the left.  Not my brother's photo--his are better--but you'll have to wait for his book to see the really good ones.  Bannerman's Castle was an armory and residence built by Francis Bannerman, the gentleman who gave us the army-navy store, back in the years after the Spanish-American War. Because a lot of his merchandise was actual armaments, he needed to store it away from population centers.  So he built himself a castle in the mighty Hudson to live pretty much on top of it. 

Yeah, it blew up. And burned.  And was abandoned for years until local people decided to save it.  Enter my brother and his friends, and his stalwart editor (me).

Back in the poetry world, I've had good news lately from The McNeese Review for a poem I wrote in answer to James Dickey's famous"Falling." It'll be out soon, and I'll let you know here and in my social media.  "Falling" was maybe the first piece of serious modern verse I read; I was barely in high school, and it upset me terribly.  I'm still really uncomfortable with the way Dickey sexualizes the subject of the poem, a stewardess (as they were called then) falling to her death after having been sucked out an airplane window. My poem was pretty much a raised finger. I'm pleased that McNeese picked it up, and I'll be very proud of the publication when it occurs. 

Also, I just got some good news from Rattle, but I can't say what quite yet.  I love being in any of the places they feature poetry: Poets Respond, the poetry prompt contests, and of course, the magazine itself.

I have a full-length poetry collection I'm shopping around, and a couple of chappies.  Pray to the gods of acceptance for me!!

So we didn't wash away in the torrential January rains.  (So annoying and they're supposed to be pretty snow.)  And for now--that's ALMOST all she wrote.  Except for this: if you're just hearing about my poetry and my young adult novels now and want some for your very own, here's my Amazon author page.  And I thank you.

Been a while since I've been a-bloggin!

So, to bring you up to date on the latest developments, the Bean Books are now a complete series.  THE AFTER TIMES is the fifth and final book in it, and it's available in Kindle and paperback. It's a Gracie book, which is to say Grace is the main time traveler, and Bean appears as a guide (as does Amp).  It's set in the early days of the pandemic, when we were all locked down, having to fabricate our own masks, and trying to get by.  I loved writing THE AFTER TIMES and if you haven't read it yet, I'd love it if you did.  I aimed it at young adults, but old adults seem to like it, too.

I'm playing a little with a new YA series right now, but since Christmas, I've been working on poetry a lot.  Found a few new literary magazines, and I have work forthcoming in The MIdwest Quarterly this summer. 

Meanwhile, 3rd Wednesday has been good to me; I've been both in their hard copy lit mag and got to be their Valentine with a poem they used online called "Love."  Took some nerve to call a poem that, and I will accept your praise for my having had it.  Wanna read it?  Clicky-click!

I've also made some good friends at a nice publication called Halfway Down The Stairs.  They're a good little ezine that does themed issues.  My poem "Forsythia" just appeared in their March issue, which was themed Strange Bedfellows.  They're reading for a Resistance themed issue now.  If you write poetry, or short fiction or non-fiction, you should consider them. Here's "Forsythia."

My long-time favorite poetry feed, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, is back from hiatus, and they are featuring books on the weekend and a poem a day during the week.  Editor Christine Klocek-Lim has an amazing eye, and being in there assures a poet of many readers.  Here's their feature on my book Unforgetting, complete with a sample poem.  I had a poem called "Owls" there not long before that--O, click and see!

So I haven't been blogging a lot--but I have been clicking the computer keys!  Thanks for bearing with me during all these YA book/poetry book/ lit mag years.  By the way, I AM collecting my current poems into what will be my fourth book of them.  I'm shopping around various versions of it now, as well as a couple of chapbooks--but I seem to have zip luck with the short po-book form.  We shall see. 

See ya in the funny papers! 

Fun fact: I already AM a paperback writer. (Holy cow, now I've got an ear worm.  You, too?) All of my books, even the poetry collections, are in paper--except for a couple of more shall we say grown-up novels I wrote under another name--they are ebooks.  I think one of them is in paper, too.

Evernight Teen, my beloved publisher, starts all their YA out on Kindle/Nook.  But then we go to paper, and for me, that's the REAL publication date.  I get to have something to hold in my hand, something I can sign to someone.  It makes me feel like a true author in a way that the glowing ebooks never do, even though I read plenty of ebooks myself. 

So I will not beat around the proverbial bush: THE AFTER TIMES IS OUT IN PAPER!!!! And the reason the previous words are IN RED is because there's the link where you can finally GET A COPY!  

Obviously, I'm joyful about this.  Initial reviews are good.  I could use a few more if you're somebody who does such things--part of being an indie author is being NOT TOO PROUD TO BEG.  But THE AFTER TIMES really is worthy of the BIZARRE stamp on all the Bean Books--a big, fat time traveling plot, a few really silly minor characters, some truly scary stuff, some sad stuff, and a bang-up happy ending.  I had a blast writing it. 

I'm also honored to be sharing a release season with one of my main inspirers, Robyn Hitchcock, who gets a few shout-outs in this final Bean Book.  His Shufflemania (GREAT record, by the way; I snagged a CD) will be out on the 21st of October, and he's doing the same thing--some pre-release copies out before the formal DROP. I get it.  You build buzz.  (You drive the author/artist a little batty, but there it is.)

So here's a little story from the TRUE LIFE of a paperback writer.  I woke up and got my email before I got out of bed, which I often do.  The joyous note from the publisher was therein, and to celebrate, I decided to make my husband and me French toast out of the leftover ciabatta bread I had from the previous night's shakshukah.  And I learned something interesting as I cooked--that preconceived notions are silly.  While we were in Maine this summer, I'd bought something called vanilla flavoring in a local grocery.  I intended to do some baking and needed vanilla extract, really, which I had always thought was vastly superior--and it often/usually is.  But here was this charming local brand of the lesser (read fake) stuff in a bottle that looked like a cowboy's bourbon stash or something: all frilly and Victorian. So I bought it. It was not only good, it was outstanding in everything I baked while we were away. 

I figured it was terroir; you know--stuff tastes better when you're on vacay?  But this morning, I dumped some in the French toast.  Voila: the best French toast I'd ever made.  My husband ate three huge pieces. So I googled the vanilla "flavoring."  Turns out it has been a passion project of one family in Maine for literally generations. 

And here it is: Mount Williams Original Vanilla Flavor.  NOT fancy-pants extract. But there's nothing fake about it!  And it freaking rocks. Google it--there are all sorts of articles about the family and the struggle to keep it in markets. Here's their website if you want some. 

Somehow, it all fits together. Maybe if you really care about what you're doing, it doesn't matter if you're a little tiny vanilla company in Portland, Maine--or a little-known but smart 'n' good writer of YA that gets read by Old Adults, too.  Maybe you will sell some bottles or copies.  (Robyn Hitchcock already has a rep as a musician's musician and used to get Robyn Hitchcock is God articles written about him in the Village Voice, so I'm leaving him out of this equation. But I hope he sells lots and lots of copies, too.)

Anyway.  Here's to passion projects.  Here's to doing it because you have to.  Here's to THE AFTER TIMES being out in paper!!

And by the way--follow my blog tour!!  There's a fifty buck prize at the end! I'll give you the heads-up every Monday on my Facebook page. 

It seems so darn 21st century American: nobody's ever on vacation--except this little bug.  Little bug was crawling on a post of a weathered dock down the hill from our rental house in its perfect ladybug way, and I decided it was relaxing, except of course it wasn't.  That was romantic thought; it was busy being a ladybug.  I decided then it was Good Luck For Me, which was optimistic, I guess, but I'll take it.

Anyway, I'm proud I got the shot.  With an iPhone, no less.  My dad, who gave me my first good camera (a Nikon F) would be impressed, but he'd have been annoyed I didn't use something other than a phone to take it.  Sorry, Dad.

But anyway, my latest book, THE AFTER TIMES, Bean 5, is out on Kindle, has gotten its first review, and it was five stars, but the reviewer was a fan of the series.  BUT, gee folks, it IS a good book.  I'm pleased with it.  I'm plugging it on social media as much as I can get away with, and I'm in Maine on "vacation."

It's lovely here.  I could show you a picture of the perfect blue sky outside the window, but I think I'd rather show you the sky that happened the other night, just out of nowhere,  I was cooking dinner and Ken was outside, and all the the sudden, the picture below happened.  Would you check that out?  I mean, seriously.  Look.

This is, as we say on the inter-tubes, no filter.  That is exactly what it looked like.  At home in New York, we actually do get tornadoes (OK, little ones, but still) in these days of global warming, and I thought that.  I wondered if I should be watching the sky show or taking cover. I also thought of my new book, because I always think of my book.  There's a tornado in it, and I really like that scene.  No spoilers about whether anyone ends up in Oz, but there are flying monkey references.

This picture wasn't a tornado, though.

But anyway: would you look at it?  Pretty darn muscular.  The problem with my house at home is that it is very old.  Colonial, in fact.  Very old American houses were built to keep the outside seriously OUTSIDE.  The place we rented has giant windows and a deck off the study.  So when something like this happens, it's YOWZA. (Um. You should read THE AFTER TIMES even if you don't get excited by weather :) It was time to say that again. )

So  yeah. Ken and I have been doing a lot of nothing. We've been doing a lot of nothing sometimes, anyway.  He walks in the morning, I do some work.  And in the afternoons, we go looking for some seafood to eat for supper.  And then we take it home and eat it. 

And then I start wondering about the book again.

I have a poet friend coming over for coffee and brownies in a while.  It's Friday of Labor Day Weekend.  I should stop laboring, I guess.  I'm on vacation.  But you'll keep hearing from me.  'Cause I got this book you gotta read, ya see...Thanks for bearing with me. 

It's a little weird to be at the end of writing the Bean Books.  I've been at it for the better part of a decade with those characters, sitting at this desk, gazing into the depths of this computer screen. I've learned you don't ever part from your characters: Bean, Zak, Amp, and Gracie will always be with me. And I feel like I've left them all in a good space.

So why the Easter basket?  Welp, that's about the thing I will miss: Easter eggs. One thing I enjoyed more than I probably should have was hiding them throughout the series.  There are ZILLIONS of them. 

You know what I mean, right?  What I'm saying is that as I wrote these books, I sprinkled them with  in-jokes for the kind of readers I hoped to have pretty much throughout. 

Only fair to provide you with a kind of treasure map, I guess.  So--stuff to be on the lookout for:

 For-real Hudson River Valley places-: Stormkill is somewhere on the banks of the River, about an hour from the City. There are Dobbs Ferry references, Sleepy Hollow references (especially the cemetery), identifiable restaurants (Luigi's is totally Sam's, Dobbs, for example) and such...

...and MUSIC--So many music Easter Eggs!!  Of course, The Grateful Dead.  They are in every book.  There are specific concerts.  You can crawl down the rabbit hole after this Easter Egg, for sure.  I tried super-hard to get the dates right. There are actually recordings accessible online of the first Dead concert Bean and Zak attend at the Fillmore East. The old Westchester County free form radio station, WRNW is the model for a lot of the action in Bean 2 (IN HER OWN TIME).  LP track listings should be correct! Young Bean has a folk rock band, and is a fan of Sandy Denny and Simon and Garfunkel. But there's a ton of early and mid-seventies music references, from Norman Greenbaum to the Byrds. Grown-up Bean works in public radio, but Gracie, the heroine of the last two books, discovers David Bowie and learns to deal with the Robyn Hitchcock obsession her boyfriend brought home from college.  It's no secret to my friends that I'm a major Robyn/Soft Boys/Egyptians fan, and I had to close the series with a wave at my old hero.  It was fun writing it from a what-the-heck-is-this viewpoint.  Classical fans will see WQXR (the New York City classical station of many years) shouted out.  And anyone who knows about Fanny Mendelssohn will recognize bits of her story in the first few Bean books.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges are the models for Bodechon College, where Bean, Zak, and Amp go---bu loose models The geography of the campus and town (Geneva, NY) more or less work. Alums will find a few things that look a bit similar. There is one Cold-Duck-soaked Thanksgiving dinner that old friends in my class will recognize.

Love is love--and fiction is fiction.  As in, these books are part of a very long, made-up story. But when you're world-building, you have to start from somewhere.  And it's fun tucking in little bits of things that folks who have walked on a path like your own will find--and pop in their Easter baskets!!  So have a look.  I think you'll find plenty of goodies. 

NEWSFLASH: BEAN FIVE, THE AFTER TIMES, IS ON PRE-ORDER for Kindle now--clicky click! 

Well, what do you know about that?

We are just about there!!

THE AFTER TIMES looks like it's going to be ready to order on or about August 19th!

It's the final book in the Bean series, a time-traveler, and yes, it's got pretty much the whole cast of characters you've grown to love (I hope you love 'em, anyway).  Bean, Zak, Amp, and Claire are now elder advisers. The new younglings are self-proclaimed nerds, Shakespeare lovers, vinyl record fans, and all around misfits: Gracie (a time-traveler to 2020 from 1962) and her friends Zoey and Dylan.

There are evil time demons, a concert cellist with a promising career in three different centuries, and a highly unlikely save-the-day visit from  the last person you'd expect to want to smash the patriarchy. And yet...

This book took me two years and then some to write. I started at the beginning of lockdown, where the book is set. And then my pandemic pivot called me away from fiction. It was a real joy to get back in the saddle and finish THE AFTER TIMES for you. I'll be posting excerpts, details about my upcoming blog tour, and buy links as soon as I've got em!  Till then, start remembering just how crazy it really WAS right at the beginning of the pandemic--no vaccine, not enough masks to go around, testing hard to come by...and people locked in together.  That's where my tale starts, but I promise you a very happy ending.  (I rewrote the last chapter three times!)

I think you're going to like THE AFTER TIMES.

Well--hooray!  Evernight Teen WILL be publishing The After Times, my time-traveling pandemic YA book, and the conclusion to the Bean series. I'm awaiting my first round of edits.  And I'm writing poetry like crazy and just had an acceptance on Rattle Poets Respond in mid-April.  Have got a bunch of other poems bundled up and out in the world getting considered for publication, too.

But that world outside my office is about as stunningly terrible as I can ever remember it being.  Some days it seems like an evil spirit has put a spell on everyone--guns, war, anger...and I have been AVOIDING the news (well, for me, anyway.  I still read the papers; I just cut myself off from cable TV reportage).

It does feel like I live in a country under attack, and the tragic thing is that the attackers are its own citizens.

I have moments of gratitude and clarity: I'm generally impressed with how right President Biden gets most things, and how steady he's been during the war in Ukraine.  I'm wildly impressed by the Ukrainian people, fighting off an unprovoked attack on their homeland. And I'm grateful, as always, that the joint forces of my family have managed to secure this piece of land halfway between suburubia and ex-urbia where I get to sit and write.

And sometimes that's all you CAN do: write.  Try to put your best out there and hope that an editor or two pick up on it and someone gets to read what you've written.  The poetry group I participate in online competes in the IBPC monthly best poems contests, and I had a poem about Grand Central Station win recently.  That was a real up because I love Grand Central Station. It's what I love about this country when things work right: public grandeur.  I loved thinking about it when I was writing the poem, loved remembering what I grew up with--and hoping things could be that good again. There's nothing wrong with hope, you know.

So, I'll let you know (boy, will I EVER) when The After Times gets nearer to press.  Meanwhile, see ya 'round the Web.

 Is the pandemic truly over?  Actually, I know the answer to that question: it is not. We are making exactly the same mistake we made in the 1918 pandemic, which was getting tired of it before it got tired of us.  In 1920, there were still many people dying of the flu that finally killed fifty million people worldwide.  But people wanted it to be over.  Both sets of my grandparents lived through it.  None of them ever mentioned a word about it to me. 

We may be toward the end of the immediate crisis, but there are still 12 hundred Americans dying of Covid every day. In mid-March, 2022!  That blows me away every time I think about it.  What we have learned to live with is incredible.

I heard Stephen King interviewed about his latest book a few months ago, and he admitted to pushing its time period back to just before the pandemic.  He didn't want to write about it.  But I kind of felt like I had to.

So my newest YA book, the concluding novel in the Bean series, is set in the really terrifying opening months of the pandemic, back when we were wiping our corn flake boxes down with disinfectant. It's called The After Times, and the title is a riff on a phrase I kept hearing during the beginning of quarantine: The Before Times.  In The Before Times, we went to movies, we didn't wear masks, we didn't run through the grocery store to try to get out in ten minutes...

And then came Covid.  The After Times, like all the Bean series books, is a time traveler.  It centers on my newest, youngest characters: Grace, Dylan, and Zoey, but the old-timers from the first three books are there, too. Everyone ends up quarantining together.  There is a demon--or possibly demon(s).  And a tornado.  And some stained glass windows that do things that stained glass shouldn't do.  And also a cameo appearance by the Patron Saint of Music, who turns out to be a total badass. I had fun writing the book

At first I wasn't sure you could do a good book under Covid Protocol.  Turns out it shapes the plot in very cool ways: who might be contagious or exposed, how so much being shut-in is affecting peoples' heads--and the big question: can time travel spread the Virus? Read The After Times and find out!

Thing is, it'll take a while.  I just now submitted my working copy of it to my usual publisher.  I'm hoping they'll like it.  But it's never too early to get people interested, so--HEADS UP!

Otherwise, I'm writing poems, getting ready for National Poetry Month.  Here's the official poster, if you want one.  I've had a few publications lately: Rattle Poets Respond back in September, and I won the Internet Poetry Bulletin Board Competition in December.  Was honored to be in the excellent Autumn Sky Poetry Daily feed a little while ago. I have a couple of chapbooks put together, too--but I'm thinking of combining them into a full-length collection.  We shall see.

So, despite war and pestilence, the words keep coming because writing is the only thing I can do to keep from losing my mind.  Me and my desk wump of a cat Bella keep our office hours daily, and the work gets done. Speaking of which, I have one more submission to make today--and then I'm running out to get some caraway seeds for the soda bread tomorrow.  Hang tough, everybody.  We'll make it through.

So, just one week ago, I climbed up onto this porch and gasped at the view.  I was in Catskill, NY, right in the middle of (you guessed it), The Catskill Mountains.  I was with my husband Ken, celebrating my first non-pandemic birthday in a while.

Actually--it was a more of a quasi-pandemic birthday.  This challenging time is not quite over yet. Ken and I are still not dining INSIDE restaurants, but we do go away on overnight trips.  This one involved taking our fully vaccinated bad selves to a tiny house resort--and it really did feel like the beginning of something new.

For almost two years, I had stopped writing fiction.  My pandemic pivot was to engineer sound for the choir I sing in with my husband.  It wasn't safe for us to sing together, so we sang into our cell phones, and I glued it all together with Logic Pro X on my computer.  To say doing that painstaking work ate my life would be an understatement. But it kept the music program alive, and we're back in the church now, singing for a masked and vaxxed congregation--masked and vaxxed ourselves. 

And I have time to write again.

I did keep writing poetry during those months, though, and I had some lovely things happen with that.  Rattle Poets Respond took my 9/11 poem, "My Sister's Birthday Is The Day After 9/11." Autumn Sky Poetry Daily nominated my poem "On The Seven Canonical Hours" for Best of the Net.  I had a pandemic poem I'm really proud of in Mobius, and published work in The Main Street Rag.  I just had a poem accepted by Eclectica--a terrific publication that's been taking my work forever--and I have many of poems under consideration at other places.  The first thing I did when the music load lightened up was submit, submit, submit!

Here's some big fun: Daria Voss, a romance writing friend, asked me for a poem in the voice of a shape-shifting lion for a new story of hers in an anthology called Rejected Mates.  I was pleased to supply her with a sonnet. I've never done that before, although one of my own romances (my pen name for such naughty behavior is Aletta Thorne) has a sonnet of mine in it.  Generally, I write free verse, but it's fun to play with form and to try something different.

So--speaking about the non-poetry part of my life...  It's been tough getting those young adult novel writing muscles back into shape.  I've given myself until the end of NaNoWriMo to finish Bean 5, which is the series' second book with a younger cast of characters.  It's a pandemic story.  High school senior Gracie Ingraham, our new time traveler, is dealing with a  host of problems since she and her best friend Zoey are stuck in the same pandemic pod with Gracie's now-ex boyfriend.  The only way out of quarantine is time travel to the past--but nobody knows if viruses time travel, too.  I'm about halfway through a pretty solid first draft, and I keep combing back over it and sharpening character and plot.  It's funny and surprisingly cozy. It'll be good.  It has to be--I think it will close the Bean series, and that's a big responsibility.  Here's my Amazon page, if you haven't read everything yet. 

Like the rest of the world, I'm trying to figure out who I am now, and what my life is going to be like.  I'm lucky.  I managed to avoid being sick.  So did my husband, thank God. And I'm a writer.  Writing is the best tool I know for figuring stuff out.  It takes time, though, and anyone who has stuck with me--THANK YOU.  I'll be getting some kind of new collection of poems together soon; I have a couple of chapbooks circulating that will either get published as the short collections they are or will become a full-length book of poetry.  I've got poems sitting in the inboxes of some good editors and publications.  And I'm WRITING again, really writing.  That's as good as the view off Thomas Cole's front porch.  Stay tuned!