Writing at the End of the World

It’s been a while.

I have several good excuses, but the best one is this: I’ve been a very busy writer, and that’s made me an unreliable blogger.

Late last year, The Heartland Review Press published a chapbook of my poems called The Country We Live In. Many of the poems are about what Keith and I get up to here at the Perry Farm: Spending a hot, dry summer day planting a field of sunflowers, only to have a flock of turkeys trot in and wallow the seeds loose. Sipping tequila in a wheat field where lightning bugs hang like drunken stars. Defending our new pond dam from a muskrat who paddles through the water, towing a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace behind him like a string of pearls. Much to my surprise and delight, the little book also is available on Amazon  and Barnes & Noble.

This spring, Boulevard Magazine published my essay “Farewell to Agro,” which tells the story of why and how we converted our hundred acres of farmland to native prairie. Jon Duelfer reviewed it at The Inquiring Reader (thank you, Jon). You can read the full essay on the Free Library website.

I also sold “The Bindweed Garden,” an essay about learning to live with Convolvulus arvensis (the vining little brat), to GreenPrints, as well as a few poems soon to be published in The Penn Review and Narrative Northeast. And may I add that right now, I have work out at twenty different markets, and there’s not one simultaneous submission in the lot.

But if this is progress, why does it feel as if writing may have become my way of . . .

Learning to dance the Renegade on a sinking cruise ship? 

Bailing said ship with an ice cream-tasting spoon?

Holding off the schooling sharks with a rubber giggle stick?

Maybe because it has. For a few hours every day, I occupy a space where nothing can hurt me and I am oblivious to the insanity in the world, the media, and sometimes, just down the lane (which is truly sad, since I live in the middle of nowhere for a reason). 

Enough of that—in the sixty seconds it took me to type that last sentence, my jaw clenched. I’m going to step outside, where there are too many tomatoes to pick, too many squash to find good homes for, and so many native plants that if I want to, I can stay lost in them until the news of the world is all good.