My Garden in the Paper & More Good Writerly News

Looks like I never linked over to a nice article written on my garden and another's (Sue) here in Lincoln. So, here's that link: Flowery Blogs.

Also, as long as I don't get bumped, I will have a small piece appearing in The Sun come August. The section is from my January-written mini memoir Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Garden (click on the bio tab above to learn more about the manuscript). Big, wonderful, lovely, important magazine you should go check out.

So if anyone's keeping count and peeing themselves like me, that's a photo in Orion for July, and some nonfiction in The Sun for August. So--freaking--awesome.

Clearly, the heavens want me to go to Oklahoma soon, do some research, and get writing the next book over the summer. But even thinking about this project sends bombs bursting in my intestines (one reason the research is taking me years). I cannot fully convey how I feel about that state where I was born, and once I cross the border, something always overwhelms me: not dread, or fear, or depression, or darkness, per se, but their is a pervasive ghost or echo that I am physically aware of (and part of that echo is my childhood, now like some odd dream). Maybe I'm making it up, but I feel Custer slaughtering Black Kettle's village on the Washita, I hear the last bison being shot and its bones ground up for fertilizer, I smell the oil in the air falling like rain from Tulsa, I feel the entire anxious weight of a nation on overdrive, boomers on the Kansas border ready for the gun shot. And that red dirt. So foreign and distant, like Mars, an unbreathable atmosphere, thick and vacuous. Oklahoma is my home (egads!) and no one's home. It's where we are all from, and it's something we must face in a changing environment and economy or else we'll repeat the same mistakes again, but even worse. See?