Writing
Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.
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This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig is exactly what the title suggests. Descriptions of the author’s rural Montana life are vivid in their presentation of the hard-scrabble ranching life in which Doig came up. Out of that challenging youth — farming, sheep herding, haying, rural community — he became… Read more
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Songbirds are arriving: sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, crows, woodpeckers, and more. In winter, geese dominated the lakes. Some remain year-round, but now they are joined by pelicans, gulls, and a variety of waterfowl moving through on the great migration. The number and variety of birds will grow in the weeks ahead. Spring is literally in… Read more
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Following is a description of how I spent the bicentennial in 1976 from my book An Iowa Life: A Memoir. I was on military leave, in between Officer Candidate School and Infantry Officer Basic Course. This year is the 250th birthday of America. I’m not feeling celebratory and wish I could go back to those… Read more
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Following is an example of the format I’m using in the project mentioned yesterday. I modify it slightly as I get the experience. March 1, 2026Closed eyes and picked a book.Poem: ElsewheresAuthor: Donald JusticeSource: Selected Poems, p. 63Line: “The drip of something – is it water?-Reaction: There is a presence in this poem. I seek… Read more
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I have nine shelves of poetry, close to 600 books. When I want poetry, I walk over and grab a book. I haven’t read them all, and may not. They serve as a spring of imagery from which to refresh myself from time to time. Roughly a fifth of them were purchased deliberately when I… Read more
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When I began writing for Blog for Iowa in 2009, I covered individual political events like the state hall of fame ceremonies and the special election of Curt Hanson. In reading those old posts, I remembered I also wrote advocacy for nuclear weapons abolition and for improvement in the environment. Those kinds of posts remain… Read more
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The portion of my autobiography after leaving a transportation and logistics career looks a lot like the ice in this photograph. Parts of it are smooth, yet thin, because only recently it was open water. Parts have frozen and thawed so many times it is difficult to determine where the surface could support a human.… Read more
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It’s cold outside, the kind of cold that stings my cheeks while walking on the state park trail. I’m standing at my workbench sorting seeds for early planting. The heat pad is already plugged in. Grow lights hang overhead. In front of me is a cabinet with last year’s leftover seeds, sorted by variety. On… Read more
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It snowed enough Friday morning to shovel the driveway. That 40 minutes of exercise substituted for trail walking yet I got this photo the day before. Ambient temperatures the next couple of days are forecast to be in the teens, so geese swimming in open water may have to find something else to do. I… Read more
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Short post today. I haven’t considered my early days on Blogger and WordPress until now. They were outlets for all kinds of writing. Been working on a chapter about the early years of social media and blogging. This paragraph needs work yet it captures one way I used the platforms in those early blogging days.… Read more
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