I just remembered that there was a free chocolate bar in my hotel room and I meant to bring it along when I checked out yesterday but forgot. What a wasted weekend.

Me, sweating, loosening my necktie as I lean over the recording console to shout into the talkback mic: LIE, Bobby, it’s LIE. Unless she’s a goddam chicken she’s LYING across your big brass bed. All right, boys, one more from the top

Two of a kind

Doesn’t seem like they mean it. I’m going in.

Robertson Davies’ FIFTH BUSINESS delivers a mounting pin to my 50yo soul

Caught in unexpected rain during a morning walk on Giudecca, what a privilege.

I don’t know if they’re giving them to everyone or if I unlocked an achievement paying my bar tab, but at checkout the hotel gave me an extra can of beer to take with me.

new four elements just dropped

So many of my interests all in one place

I’ve done something right today

Can’t say I like the look of this gang of horses trying to lure me down a lonely road.

Oh my God, found where the alien pod-benches are being grown. These look to be close to hatching.

At last your home can be fully equipped for all sorts of mysterious happenings.

Greenspace, Amsterdam

My lovely daughter is walking the Camino de Santiago, solo, in memory of her friend Juliette who died so tragically from meningitis earlier in the year. All money raised will go to the Meningitis Research Foundation. Should you be able to help she, and Juliette’s family, would be immensely grateful.

I did not make the most graceful entry into this new year.

Thanks to @chillsubs.bsky.social for highlighting some literary magazines students in the MFA program at Emerson College can get involved with. If you'd like to know more about those publications, please feel free to contact me as the program director.

any person with a public library could print this screenshot, manually scale it up on a copier, add the URL, run off 50, and post these all over town. anyone w university access could flyer in buildings. (easy and cheap to redo if they're taken down)

Pregaming outside the music festival gates, 50yo style

Nice to be greeted by @julianhoffman.bsky.social at the front door of Waterstones Amsterdam today.

From my ongoing series “Scenes a better photographer could have done a lot with”

At @necessaryfiction.com today, @bookbent.bsky.social, @dianejosefowicz.bsky.social, @mbailatj.bsky.social and I share some reading suggestions for the summer.

Have just finished reading THE FORTNIGHT IN SEPTEMBER, after adding it to my list years ago thanks to @backlisted.bsky.social. What a beautiful, bittersweet novel. Very different from the other I've read by RC Sherriff, THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT, but with a kindred soul.

Sidewalk art

Congratulations to @isaacbutler.bsky.social, whose brilliant new book The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars is published today! I had the privilege of reading an advance copy and I'm excited for the conversations it's going to start.

Congratulations to Tom, and to the rest of us who will get to read this.

Best thing I've seen so far today is this video embedded in an article about cottage cheese. vp.nyt.com/video/2026/0...

Barbecue picnic at a farm: sitting in the sun eating and drinking and enjoying live music while a kid who picked up a coyote decoy from the field runs around menacing adults. A fine afternoon.

I am very much looking forward to having a copy of this and am arranging all the necessary warding objects around my house now

My sincere apologies to The Onion, Stan Kelly and anyone who thought of this before I did

I finished the first draft of a novel yesterday, which mostly means I have a ton of work ahead of me before it is (I hope) readable. But it’s always a good feeling to have set out to make something and to have made it.

Swamping the drain

Every now and again, we "unlock the vault" to dig into our archive for something that resonates—and there's always something. We think these are times for poetry. Here's a piece from Jane Hirshfield, along with five more at the link. orionmagazine.org/article/from...

One of the best feelings while drafting a long project is rereading earlier pages and seeing that something you thought you only came up with toward the ending was set up for months or years earlier but you forgot. It's almost like knowing what you're doing!

Esteemed colleagues, I move that we adjourn this committee meeting on the grounds I am only a few pages away from a complete novel draft and nothing we do here will be more interesting to me than that.

Here's some nice things people have been saying about my new book "The Perfect Moment." And hey... you can preorder it today!

This is what i mean when i talk about teaching literature as a plastic art--language, grammar, is real material we really manipulate, with a history and conventions of manipulation, to cause real things to happen

Grass leak

It's true we've had some good times together, but where do the years go?

Grade inflation has led to too many As, costing Pizza Hut an unsustainable number of free personal pan pizzas every time report cards come out.

Yesterday I dissected a disappointing owl pellet but today I made up for it by writing my protagonist dissecting a better owl pellet.

A new destination for my workday walks

Social media ban for people of all ages but 30. For one year, you have the run of the platforms: free to meet all other 30-year-olds, to post videos of yourselves dancing or ranting, to dogpile each other for bad takes. Then on your 31st birthday, you're cast out again into the eerie silence of IRL.

AI fools us into thinking we aren't capable of our own brilliance, that we require some vast, world-eating apparatus to become the things we already are. But the very conditions that have produced this stupid machine are those which, as we suffer under them, make our work novel and urgent.

Wrapped up work on a really cool book proposal project. Would you like to be next? ⬇️

On the left, the amount of pages I wrote from May 2025 until May 2026, trying to get a novel going. On the right, the same novel in the past month. What a relief when a spark finally catches.

Off I go!

The *purpose* of higher ed isn’t ‘a better job and higher pay’. It’s becoming a more learned, insightful, and critically thoughtful person. One side benefit of learning, insight, and discernment can be career advancement — but it can also be sacrificial self-offering in public service, for example.

the day's writing plans derailed by a plumbing problem, a tale as old as time