I’m excited to share that I’ll be participating in the holiday market at Cary House this Saturday, December 13th from 12-5. If you’re not a local, shame to your family, but otherwise I hope to see you at what might be the last pop up of 2025!

In other news, 2026 will mark ten (!) years since I sold my debut novel at auction to Little Brown Young Readers, an accomplishment I dreamed of since I was just a little cliche, long before I knew how to spell, back when I filled notebooks with scribbly lines I pretended meant something. I’m here today to say they did.

Getting published early in my career was a delight and a challenge, the latter because I secured a two book deal but had only written one novel. Hold please. They say the second book is the hardest to finish and I’m here today to say Bet. (My students teach me all the lingo. 6-7 to you, too, Forest, River, Grassy Plain, whatever your Gen Z eco-overgrowth name).

In fact, Dear Universe was the third second book I wrote, the previous two having been scrapped by my editor for excellent reasons: awkward pacing, weak plot, sentences playing dead on the page, the writing as engaging as “flat drugs girl” which is what I had to Google to find this ol’ chestnut:

Honestly, I almost didn’t make the absolute last deadline in my contract to submit the final manuscript, which would have meant returning part of my advance, but my agent had some advice. She said Write closer to your experience. She said, less tritely than this, What’s the book in your heart? It reminds me of something Ann Patchett said:

Amen for our capacities, limited and lolligagging.

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In the spring of 2020 Dear Universe was published - TRIGGER WARNING - at the start of lockdown, throwing a monkey wrench in publicity plans that I blame for e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. Book festivals were shuttered and shuttled to Zoom. Speaking engagements turned their cameras off. What can you do? Every book has a shelf life, but every author just has a life.

Last month I learned that the print copies of my books are being remaindered—an unfortunate scenario wherein the printer outdid itself. You shouldn’t have! Copies of my books have officially outnumbered their demand and so off they go in their caskets to discount book distributors where, whether or not they see the light beyond the bubblewrap, will make no difference to my 10% royalty. Sorry, sugar. A new book is born every Tuesday in Big 5 publishing. $1.60 doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it.

Fortunately, I have two more days to buy back my books for less than $1! What would you do? It seems like a trippy modern art performance to suddenly start purchasing what I was initially paid to produce—like capitalism eating its tail, like a late stage snake duped by the exchange rate, stooped by how value is assigned to art and labor and how it changes and oh, how it changes!

The last part of the Patchett quote, at least as Goodreads chose the cut-off, reads:

Hope to see you Saturday :)

An educator situated within the Zen tradition, Goldberg emphasized not being too precious with the final product. Generally her style of writing instruction is an exercise in letting go that challenges the creative’s desire for polish and perfection, publicity and pearls. No, no! There will be nothing like that here. What you get is what you get is what comes out. Suck it up, buttercup. You owe me five cents.

(Goldberg writes more gently than the writer and I dialogue within me, but softness is a lifelong practice and I’m only just getting my sea legs, having been born a jelly fish).

It was years – five, six, seven? – between discovering the book on a shelf in Western Massachusetts and publicly debuting the typewriter I had no experience using, a rookie mistake, for a Royal Classic does not a MacBook make. I had to write a couple of books, establish my voice and style and unique habits of what is ultimately, mark my words, a very personal practice. I had to apply to grad school – once, twice, thrice – before entering a three year program as a poet and graduating a fiction writer. I had to accrue opinions on creative writing pedagogy and the Iowa style workshop, and mothers and bluebirds and mustaches gone rogue before offering free poems to anyone who wanted one. I had to want it, regardless of what “it” was.

It helped that Dandy Line launched as part of a course in the form and theory of poetry. We were encouraged to ask: How does a poem change, both in process and product, when the usual assumptions around its composition are flipped, altered, or examined? How can poetry be an agent for social transformation, sparking collaboration, connection, and community?

Every poet is a parrot but still each performer must establish their own parameters for spontaneous, collaborative, public poetry. Terminology varies accordingly. I say “typewriter poetry” or “pop-up poetry” but I’ve also seen “Your Poem, Your Price” or “Three Minute Poems” or “Custom Poems–$55”. (That last one is just New York City inflation viewed on TikTok for your filtered pleasure).

“How does it work?” the curious ask. I pursue the following constraints:

1. A private practice becomes a public one; normally glazed over by god’s lazy eye, the lonely poet breaks from her basement and composes in real time for an unknown audience of all ages, interests, and needs, sometimes one set of eyeballs, sometimes twenty.

2. Fodder for the poem is externally inspired, prompted by the stranger’s request. Immediately we’re in collaboration because the topic is up to them.

3. Dialogue about the subject, obsession, etc. ensues. I ask a lot of questions and take notes by hand while I listen. The conversation usually starts with something like, “And what does BLANK mean to you?” with BLANK being anything from adzuki beans to the Immaculate Conception.

4. Some minutes pass, maybe a few more. What is time but a sprig of thyme?

5. The poem is executed and the product finalized on an old manual typewriter, one with sonic capacities that no pencil or computer can boast and certainly without electricity or a “re-do capacity,” nothing like an eraser or backspace key or command X. As such:

   1. The machine’s immediacy overrides the poet’s itch to edit and mold the product into something more like the gorgeous sonnet she imagined, something without ink smudges and typos and that self-conscious something or other right around line blip. Oh, whale.

   2. The out-of-use technology has heavy, foreign-feeling keys which slow the poet down, changing the process of composing the poem with who-knows what impact on the final product! Thrilling!

   3. Not to mention how the vintage Smith Corona inspires curiosity and wonder, effectively captivating folks who wouldn’t bat an eye over a free poem normally. It evokes nostalgia, that juicy, meaty thigh that melts poetry down to its bones.

6. Upon completion — idk, it just feels done — I read the poem aloud. So many writers never get to see how their words impact a reader, especially not in real time or in their own voice. While I have my customers hostage, I make full use of the opportunity!

7. Every poem is free and abandoned, free for many reasons beyond the scope of this bullet point, but a lovely topic for another time. Abandoned because wouldn’t you love to let go? (By this I mean my “best” poems aren’t submitted to fancy contests that confirm one’s status as a poet while taming the ego’s flyaways. Typewriter poems are given back to the customer as a free token of the exchange, an artifact of an unduplicateable moment in time.

In theory the project excited me. In practice it sustains me. If the Dandy Line Poetry was only upheld by its theoretical underpinnings, I don’t know that I’d be entering my fifth year. But the iterative exchange is one of being seen and heard many times over in both directions. Customers express awe and appreciation for their souvenirs — or they give me their tears, I love tears! Or their tips, I love tips! — and I feel a reciprocal sense of gratitude towards them for letting me be a poet in a world. In a society — a culture, a literary scene, an academic hostage situation — where poets are chosen by a chosen few, wouldn’t you like to say fuck that?

Here it is in action, if you’d like to see…

Welcome to Buffalo, baby, where football enthusiasts aren’t fans but mobsters and the difference between six feet of snow and six flurries is just a parking lot facing the other direction. Seriously.

After four years of living up against the Blue Ridge Mountains and the country’s oldest river, one of the few on this continent that flows north, I’ve come back this way, too. Ten-ish months into this adventure and the city of friendly neighbors, of Josh Allen enthusiasts and bumper stickers and yard signs stating “Bills Mafia” allegiance, does not disappoint. Though you won’t see me shoveling out any football stadiums, I do appreciate the steadfastness, the blessed chicken wing, the proximity to Canada.

It took a few months to get settled into a new apartment, a new job, and a new life. I waited until the cold lifted and the cherry blossoms fell to find the right place to take my typewriter. The first ask is always the clumsiest.

Over the summer – a truly terrible season, but since when has poetry minded emotional duress – I was given permission to set up my booth outside of Talking Leaves bookstore. The small, independent shop is on the corner of a popular street in Elmwood where an adjacent cafe hosts open mics on Wednesdays and a seasonal farmers’ market inhabits the park on Saturdays. (My Virginia farmers’ market was year-round, but comparing states does not make for a sound mental one. Onward.)

As summer became fall, I wrote poems next to the sale cart for well-loved books, met couples and mothers and pets, got rained out. The poems were about fresh starts in new apartments, friendships formed over chronic pain and college classes, hungry lovers sharing soft-baked pretzels, happy kids who only spent weekends with their fathers and so loved them the most.

“I hope it works,” the owner of Talking Leaves book store said during our first meeting.

Funny to think of something like my operation as “working” or not. When it comes to free poems, the line is as murky for failure as it is for success. Do I fail if no one comes? If everyone comes? If a crowd of children start throwing stone fruit? If God swoops down with a red pen and a pigeon steals my tips?

Next month will mark four years of pop-up poetry – a labor of love that seems to be working. In this next era of Dandy Line, a poetic occupation of the 7-1-6, I expect nothing, delight in everything, and appreciate you.

P.S. If you’re a Buffalonian who knows of a good indoor spot to partake in holiday crafts, let me know!

There is a lot to be horrified about this week. Amidst violence, threats, misinformation, strong emotions, and projections, I’ve become particularly preoccupied and more overwhelmed with daily annoyances. It is a privilege to have the mental capacity to consider this question given the outcome of the election, but if you are also needing to mull something else over:

How many digital relationships are too many?

1. Let’s agree a digital relationship is _______ and “too many” as________ (insert your own criteria).

2. For me, a digital relationship is one where I engage with someone more over the internet than in person. Someone who – over the course of a day or week or month – I am physically with maybe 15% of the time, but must communicate with 85% of my workday, which means there’s at least one screen between us at any given moment from 8AM-5PM, not counting lunch, and approximately thirty-minutes every quarter to interpret facial expressions, hear their voice, say kindly as my tongue bleeds, “thank you for that feedback,” etc.

   

3. “Too many” digital relationships = the amount of I have now.

4. “Too many” presents as being overwhelmed — nay, irate —by the number of people I have to imagine sitting at their computer receiving my email just so I can craft an email in the first place! And of course crafting an email takes a whole lunch break because I can’t intonate and must resort to emojis to convey that I’m not mad, per se, except there’s an army of them now and by the time I’ve sorted through them all…

   

5. And when I say email I mean all of it—text messages, chat-apps, other apps with chat features, Zoom calls with audio (camera on or off), Slack notifications, Teams alerts (The fact that they’re called alerts…)

6. I know the number of digital relationships I’m maintaining is too many because I detest them all now — not the people, but hearing from them. I avoid social media and ignore text messages, and am most at ease when my phone is off or dead.

   

7. I should admit I am sometimes grateful for this spewing web of communications when I miss an old friend or need to hear from an auntie or a mom—and connection is so incredibly crucial right now—human connection—to be able to perceive the humanity in each other even when we can’t be together in the flesh.

8. I should also admit I don’t have a remedy for digital relationships in the workspace (or long distance family and friends, or the state of the world), but I do have a typewriter.

   

   Next pop-up event is at Blacksburg Books this Saturday, November 9th from 12-4, if you’d like to stop by 🙂

The poem on my wall is an excerpt from a book I haven’t read, The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich. My mom copied a few lines down and sent them to me from Maine to Virginia on thick paper bright with her watercolor crayons. Is there anything better than getting a letter in the mail? Is there any handwriting more lovely than a mother’s font? The excerpt reads:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Wasting sweetness is a funny point of entry for hope, but picture it!

Picture the earth with her tongue out, waiting for that fallen fruit.

Imagine mealy apples perforated with worms as they sink into the ground or grace an animal before descending into dust.

Sweetness for whom?

Wasted on what? 

Here is my mother’s version:

Notice she made it pretty.

Notice she added line breaks.

Notice it all matters—

The colors, the placement of the words, the way the text looks on the page, and how it hits emotionally, not because I understand the context of the quotation, but because I no longer need characters or plot once the piece announces itself as poetry. Whether it was meant to be or not, anything that, when received, feels like a fat morsel in your cheek, sugary as hell and dying to meet its maker on your tongue, could be a poem. And then it does.

I keep this one on my wall to remember to taste what I haven’t savored and call my mom and say thank you and write back.

NEXT POP UP EVENT

Saturday, July 6th, from 12-4 at Blacksburg Books!

Dead pet poems are common requests. I love to write them - to ask and listen and write in commemoration of a beautiful orange tabby with dragon green eyes that liked to share slices of American cheese for dinner. Dead since November, her owner hasn’t worn mascara since.

I love writing poems about the dead because they bring mine back too. With the typewriter between us - myself and a stranger - grief is allowed. Though we mourn different loves, we are living along the same dotted line where grief signed our initials and dared us to go on. 

As the self-professed cat lady and grade school teacher showed me videos of her nineteen and a half year old cat, I took notes, trying to fit remnants of memories on a 6x6 piece of cardstock: how Liona loved to stare out the window and chirp at the birds and do the roll and stretch; how there were boyfriends, sure, but really for the last twenty years it had been the two of them, this woman and her cat, and the photos she showed progressed over both of their lifespans - a college girl holding a kitten, a woman carrying a ball of orange fur in a monogrammed blanket.

It’s not uncommon for folks to tear up talking about the subject of their poem - grandparents, exes, etc. but every time I am moved by how vulnerable a person is willing to be. I am honored to be trusted to record what people have cherished the most and lost. 

Thank you to the friends who have come out to Blacksburg Books these last few months for Valentines and eulogies and tributes and a lot of genre-less momentos in between. Thank you for listening as I’ve read them back to you. 

According to my algorithm the difference between an obituary and a eulogy is a “notice of a death” versus “praise for someone who has just died.” One sounds more human than the other, but neither is correct. Grief is a genre of its own and on its own. Poetry is sacred because it asks what is most painful about the thing that hurts, and in return for making what is private public, it soothes, or wants to, and sometimes that is consolation enough.

Her heart is broken. She wants a poem about hope, but it’s winter. She wears purple tie dye overalls and does not want to hear Rumi speak of the thousand half-loves it takes to take the real love home. I might be misremembering.

T is happiest when she is outside. She appreciates potatoes, which grow no matter where you throw them, pretty much. Recently, she left her partner and their farm and it’s too cold to live in the dirt now. She likes how potatoes keep on growing beneath the ground, though. She understands wanting, for a season, to be imperceivable. 

In exchange for a poem T gives me a sachet of lavender she grew herself, and two pieces of quartz she dug up in North Carolina. The rocks are legitimate crystals from long, long ago, resurrected from the state she grew up in, and sometimes returns to.

You’re probably only the fourth or fifth person to ever touch this, T says, and unwraps one of the sparkling stones from crinkled tissue paper in her overalls pocket. It is splashed inside and out with stars, tiny and shiny and jagged and sparkling in each irregular corner. 

I don’t know much about crystals beyond the myth and lore you can get at a health food store. I don’t know a lot about growing potatoes, either, but I do know a little about moving to this town with a broken heart. T is right. Winter isn’t necessarily hospitable. 

The Saturday recalled in this Dandy Note was a nasty mess of sleet and rain, with just enough ice on the ground, hype in the news, and scattered flurries in the morning for the whole town to hope for a little accumulation all afternoon. There was none. At the end of the day it was still January in Virginia. Warmth won out. 

That is what I hope for T, too. For the chill to be relative. For the season to trust itself. For the exchange of earthly treasures–grown, found, and made–to be free. 

Thank you to Blacksburg Books for having me in their lovely space for pop-up poetry, and thank you to the friends who showed up to support the Dandy Line during the first week of 2024. Next up: Valentine’s Day. 

Amidst The New Yorker’s best books of 2023, there is a recommendation for Ben Lerner’s collection, The Lights. Embedded within this review is a slight towards poetry, not meant to be one at all, I don’t think, that I’ve been considering for a few days now. The reviewer says:

“Much of this [collection] is about re-enchanting poetry itself, which can sometimes seem an outdated, indulgent form, severed from the modern world.”

Poor poetry! As outdated and indulgent as a mink shawl, as medieval and monotonous as any alliteration out there, just as severed from modernity as the animal from its pelt.

And yet, when a person dies, when a person is born, when a nation is harmed, when a campus is destroyed–our ears open like hungry clams for nothing more.

The next part of the Lerner review reads, to me, as a reconciliation: “But life and art can’t be held apart.” 

Because what else are we doing here?

If poetry is severed from modernity, I hope to reconsider survival. If poetry is indulgent, I beg my cry babies find a better form. If poetry is in need of re-enchantment, why allow it to mesmerize, persist?

The review ends on the poet’s own words: “Lyric poetry, Lerner writes, might be best understood as “our own / illumination returned to us as alien.”’

And that is what I wish to be doing here, rejoicing in the lament. Woe is poetry, for all it does is enchant.

Thanks to the friends of the Dandy Line Poetry for coming out to celebrate the human predicament this year. If the lines we turn to in refuge now are not now-enough, then let’s be old among them.

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I want to tell you about the first time – how I’d never used a manual typewriter before and so the keys beneath my fingertips weighed a couple pounds each. I want to tell you about the line of people that formed at the farmers’ market by our sign, “FREE POEMS,” and I want to tell you about why I keep coming back.

The minutes before the market opened were terrifying – who was I to publicly declare myself a poet and thus insinuate I had something worth saying – but as curious folks approached and we began talking about the things that mattered to them – lima beans, old pets, magic fathers, and new beginnings – my fears subsided. Though I wrote slowly, loudly, and clumsily, once I read my first “finished” poem out loud to a “customer” I was hooked on the liveliness of these heartfelt, artistic exchanges.

Normally my writing was a private, solitary act, but with this new medium, I understood how my words could serve someone besides myself. The poems I wrote mattered not because they were “good,” but because they resulted from an honest conversation between two strangers who both wanted to be seen and heard. The exigence was not competition, as it can sometimes be in a classroom or writing workshop, but the very human desire to use words both spoken and written to connect.

For the last two years, I have continued with this platform because the success of the operation has very little to do with me or the “quality” of my poetry. Each poem is a collaboration rooted in human dialogue, and I am so moved by how very willing people are to be vulnerable in these exchanges. The conditions are casual—there are few stakes lower than a free poem—but I am humbled by the earnesty with which people have approached my table with a word. There’s often a whole story behind a single utterance, and this newsletter is written in the spirit of those stories.

Upcoming Appearances:

Blacksburg Farmer’s Market: September 2nd

Hope to see you there!