Author
Published Writings
Poetry gets a bad rap. I can say this as a teacher who has never given up on the good fight to bring poems into the classroom. I continue to hope that one will alight on someone when they aren’t even looking.
It always surprises me that in an age when concentration spans are so short, even brevity isn’t enough to sell a poem to most people. Although I do love a good long poem, I find that the shorter ones are excellent talismans against some of the harshest and most bewildering times in life.
I’ve been writing poems since I was about ten years old and I plan to continue writing them until all my lines run out. I hope you enjoy some of those I share in this book and I hope that you are inspired to write your own.
Most of my reflections are autobiographical, but that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily all completely true. Sometimes I change names to protect the innocent but I’m generally the guiltiest of all.
I like writing these short reflections because I still haven’t figured out a way to take all the bits of experience and make them into one coherent whole. So I’m happy to wonder about things that come and go.
This book spans childhood to the present, with quite a bit of humor, which I consider indispensable.
I started making up new words within the theme of cooking and eating, for my book Freshly Baked Words.
They usually transpired from the union of different languages or combinations and plays on existing words.
But we need new words for many occasions. When I met Kati, the illustrator for the book, I found the perfect visual complements to these new words.
I’m hopeful that we might all understand each other more if we can identify the situations or feelings we have all encountered and put just the right word to them. Then, suddenly, we are not alone.
