Poets Anonymous will publish my work in its upcoming annual Gathering anthology

I am so pleased to share here that Poets Anonymous will yet again publish my work in its annual Gathering anthology; my poem “As Silver as the Stars You Tried to Rival” will appear in Gathering 2025.

You can preorder a copy of the book right here at the Local Gems Press website.  The launch event will be on August 27th in Chantilly, Virginia.  (Details are at the website.)

This will be the third year running that Poets Anonymous has selected my writing for this annual collection.  I am grateful to Lesley Tyson and Megan McDonald of Poets Anonymous, along with James P. Wagner of the Bards Initiative.



I’m a Fred I have another bad pun for you.

So here’s the plan — I’m gonna move back to my college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and start a poetry group there.

Gonna call it “Fred Poets Society.”

(I already e-mailed my old writing prof and told him he had to be our Mr. Keating.)



Painting by Veronica Maria Herwegen-Manini, Late 19th or Early 20th Centuries

Oil on canvas.  Between 1867 and 1933.

Life of Pie.

“Tightrope,” Paul Klee, 1880

Throwback Thursday: “The Return of the Living Dead” (1985)!

One of my tragic flaws is that I am consistently late to the party when it comes to cool stuff.  (Seriously.)  So I never saw “Return of the Living Dead” (1985) in the 80’s.  I saw it around … 1993 or 1994, I guess,  on VHS tape in the Mary Washington College dorm room of Rhett Carlson and Nickolai Butkevich.

I truly enjoyed it, which is unusual for a horror-comedy.  (Movies can either scare me or make me laugh, but they can rarely do both.)  Yes, I am one of the people out there who finds “Return of the Living Dead” genuinely creepy.  C’mon … it’s got decent makeup effects — and both the “Tarman” zombie and the slab woman, for example, are pretty well executed monsters.

Hey … there’s a remake due out this Christmas.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it’s any good.



Poster for “Westworld” Season 3 (2020)

HBO.

Cover to “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen” #1, Curt Swan & Stan Kaye, 1954

DC Comics.

Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers