"The light was no more than a mean and taunting reminder of what light could be, a rumor of what light there once was." – a #SundaySentence from Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter, once again, because the book could supply Sunday Sentences to last several glorious years.

#Adobe software just told me a PDF of a literary essay appeared to be long and did I want an #AI summary? Per Flannery: Any summary of any literary work is a disservice, never done adequately. The only proper thing to do is to read it. AI venerates efficiency as the world's primary virtue. Not so.

Such a lovely, restrained tribute. Stephen King is a treasure.

RIP, #JoeEly. A musician who couldn't be defined by genre except "Americana." Here he is with #TheFlatlanders, performing the song of my fascination, which also can't be defined by genre. Their version cranks up the energy. Hat tip to Robbie Gjersoe on solo guitar. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KULL...

Eyes of wren's-egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively. A fragment, but still my #SundaySentence from Kevin Barry's THE HEART IN WINTER, a book chockful of sentences to astonish.

My new Great Blue Heron. Design by northern Michigan printmaker Gwen Frostic (1906-2001), ink by Jesse of @lineandlegacytattoo

Creative artistic solutions require creative artistic humans. Read this interview with the English-language translator of Jacek Dukaj's ambitious novel ICE and imagine how many ways AI translation apps would fail at the same task. culture.pl/en/article/a...

A #SundaySentence from John Cheever's story, "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill."

Once again for Thanksgiving, this poem, following a year of miraculous good and formidable ill. You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter. I give you thanks for good and ill. Eternal light in everything on Earth. As now, so on the day after my death. -- "Thankfulness," Czesław Miłosz; trans. by Robert Haas

A reminder that old #KenBurns remains as relevant as new Ken Burns. Just finished 2019's Country Music and came away knocked out by the poetry and storytelling. Also, troubled by the commodification. Cash, Hank Williams, and Emmy Lou Harris are national gifts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZ_...

What @janefriedman.com says! If you can, please support writers, readers, and the Good Contrivance Farm Writers' Retreat. secure.givelively.org/donate/good-...

My first literary hero ... and still my literary hero at age 97. "I have been true to everything in life." – Legs Diamond www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/a...

Good Contrivance Farm is a magical place for readers and writers. I’m pleased to serve on the non-profit’s volunteer board. We’re engaged in our first-ever year-end fundraiser. If you can help us in our mission to support literary culture, thank you. bit.ly/WriterFarm #literarylife #writingcommunity

I first saw food stamps in 1975 when Mom used them in a grocery store line. I was 11 then, or 12. Eventually, Dad and Mom had stable work and didn't need the country's help anymore. But the country was there for us when we did. That the administration now chooses to deny hungry people sickens me.

This proud @uarizona.bsky.social alum (Class of '86) is looking at you, President Garimella. Reject the compact now.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” Edgar Allan Poe died today in1849 in Baltimore.

Reading White, Latino, Asian, Black, Man, Woman, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish-- we are remarkably alike in the printed word. In sharing our experiences, we're talking about the outside. Our inner voice, our happiness & despair, is universal. This is why people who want to divide us attack books.

For #BannedBooksWeek, I'm for the first time reading this "horrorshow," the most banned book in the U.S. in 2025, per Pen America. Stephen King is the most banned author. I used to think Banned Books Week was a way to remind ourselves not to fall into a bad old history. Yet, here we are.

No #SundaySentence this week. Instead, here's a scene from a literary talk featuring writer Debra Spark in the barn at Good Contrivance Farm. I suppose the luna moth is a fine sentence.

I want the USA to be free from the poison of guns so badly

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Politico estimates the cost of the Nat'l Guard in L.A. to have been $134 million. Cost of deployment in Washington, D.C., is estimated to be $1 million a day. Now, if he goes into Chicago and other blue-state cities? That's a lot of Medicaid, a lot of food stamps, a lot of grants for art ... .

He looked at me like I was his spanking newborn baby and he did love me so, but feared the world would never be what any of us had hoped for. –a daughter recalls her father in this #SundaySentence from Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible.

Hey, #NEA. Go ahead and yank annual funding for creative writing. Maybe spend that $875k on Diet Coke for the West Wing. But for F's sake, don't capitulate to the tyrant's gold-plated vanity by capitalizing "administration." Unless it's at the start of a sentence, which this is not.

Read what @semi-rad.com writes. Your day will be better for it. semi-rad.com/2025/08/the-...

"Grandma can't fall asleep without the noise of the table saw." – a #SundaySentence from the remarkable novel VORACIOUS by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by @antonialloydjones.bsky.social. Published by @lindeneditions.bsky.social

Announcing a special micro category for the Baltimore Review fall issue: 400 words max, one or two micros in one sub, micro submission period (9/1 – 9/14) and response by 9/30. Payment for accepted work at our usual rate. Because we love the short and surprising. baltimorereview.org

"I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order."

A good day to remind ourselves:

For me, this will be a must read.

"--what circle of #Hell is this?!" ... from Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring #4 (2025), written and illustrated by Patrick Zircher, colored by Pete Pantazis #Comics

"I give you Thurman Munson ... spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe." – a #SundaySentence I've long loved, too long for Bluesky's character limitations, so the screen grab. From Michael Paterniti's classic, "The House that Thurman Munson Built," first published in Esquire, September 1999.

Breakfast in Baltimore with James Baldwin.

To begin, I must admit that I am no one you know, and ask you to excuse my forwardness. – a #SundaySentence from the anthology Letters to a Stranger, "To the Young German Horsewoman, Chosen to Help with Réttir," by Pam Houston

The US government has sent innocent men to be beaten and raped in a foreign gulag www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

At last watching Ken Burns' "Country Music." So many of its featured performers have recorded the song of my fascination, "Sitting on Top of the World." Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Asleep @ the Wheel, Bill Monroe, the Carter Family, Willie Nelson. And the song predates our concept of country.

Their father was shot against a wall for one of those things, and the mother died of T.B. and undernourishment in 1941. –a #SundaySentence from The Hive, Camilo José Cela's novel about Madrileños living under Franco's dictatorship.

Such insidious language. "Compliance with Administration directives." "Administration" capitalized as if a proper noun. "Compliance," related to "complaisant" and "comply," meaning "to acquiesce," to accept without protest the directives. Of the (capitalized) Administration. Anodyne and terrifying.

And so, as you hear these words Telling you now of my state I tell you to enjoy life I wish I could but it's too late

"Some people's guts must be large and soft, like slugs, and other's small and hard, like the flint of a lighter." – a #SundaySentence from Camilo José Cela's THE HIVE, translated from Spanish by J.M. Cohen and Arturo Barea.

A brave writer tries new things with each novel. Dan Fesperman tries something new in PARIAH and the NYTimes approves. “Dan Fesperman, wielding a sharp eye for atmospheric detail and a finely tuned ear for comic relief, has proved to be one of the genre’s most exciting contemporary writers.”

Good summer reading y'all, coming to you from the hard-working volunteers at Baltimore Review.

Heart ache. Heart fury. These are biscuits to feed hungry children.

"In the Crypt of this Church, near the Body of her honoured Father...lies the mortal part of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington Whose spirit hopes for that Peace, thro' the infinite Merit of Christ, which a cruel & merciless world never afforded her." – a #SundaySentence from a tomb inside St. Ann's, Dublin

"We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something useful–perhaps like God after the first day of creation." –a #SundaySentence from Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz." Translation by Stuart Woolf.

Just ended 10 remarkable days in Kraków with writing grad students from Johns Hopkins University. Literature, history, current events, language, culture–we did it all. Here we are at Szymborska Park. Like the poet, we value "The joy of writing. / The power of preserving. / Revenge of a mortal hand."

Apparently, Jim Shooter was a controversial editor because of his management style. What did I know about that? I was 13, 14, 15, 16, engrossed by the Marvel Universe he oversaw. Godspeed, Mr. Shooter.

Only the most secure nations dare to unleash their artists, those writers and dancers and painters and poets, and archivists, who will brazenly reveal our beauty, our ugliness, our past, and our today. – a #SundaySentence, former U.S. Congressman Pat Williams (D-Mont) from an oral history interview

Pat Williams, a tough and tender Montana Congressman, died this week. He said of America and the arts: "The arts and our rights, particularly freedom of expression, are inexorably linked. The artist has an intimate relationship with what we Americans, and perhaps all people, like to refer to as...

"In the end, people will become mindless servants to iron geniuses and, perhaps, will worship them as gods." – from Stanisław Lem, featured on this street mural in Kraków, Poland.