Ballard is a Seattle neighborhood.  A former student of mine has a riff where she describes the two faces of Ballard:  There’s the old Scandinavian community, the fishing boats, brick houses, and the Nordic Heritage Museum.  And the new Ballard that sits at Cupcake Royale with their Macs, looking important and saying, “I am so  Read the Rest…

“Writing a poem is an attention-getting act, so it might be worth asking whose attention are you getting and why?”  says Billy Collins in an interview in The Paris Review, Fall 2001.  Billy Collins, a rock star among American poets, knows something about attention. I’ve gotten almost more attention than I can stand this past  Read the Rest…

My book came out last Thursday on the full moon in Taurus, an auspicious day.   Taurean energy is both creative and possessive and my book, two and a half years in the writing, is all about me.   A memoir is not history.  I didn’t pretend to set out facts.  I wrote as I remembered but  Read the Rest…