New Year’s greeting card illustrated by Kate Greenaway, circa 1900

Photography, 2024

I was lucky enough to get a few photos published this past year.  If you’d like to take a gander at them, all of my published photos can be found in the section below:

Photography



Photo of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by Mikhail Evstafiev, 1994

Russian writer and Nobel prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn looks out from a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, before departing on a journey across Russia.  Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile.



Poetry and Commentary, 2024

2024 was a banner year for my poetry.  If you happen to enjoy my ongoing, Kafka-esque portraiture of a neurotic scribbler, all of the year’s publications can be found right here:

Poetry and Commentary, 2024



Cover to “Batman: The Last Halloween” #1, Tim Sale, 2024

DC Comics.

“Please linger near the door …”

Poetry Hall again translated my poetry for its global readership of Chinese readers.

I received some really terrific year-end news a little while ago — Poetry Hall again translated a selection of my work for its worldwide audience of Chinese readers.

The biligual journal, which prints poems in both English and Chinese, selected three of mine for Issue 26; the poems are “Blue,” “Autumn Girl” and “The Mountain At Summer, Seen From A Passing Car.”

I am grateful to Kai Mills, Managing Editor of English Poetry, for allowing me to see my writing showcased in Poetry Hall this second time around.

If you would like to purchase Issue 26, you can find it right here on Amazon.

I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season!



It’s true what they say — never shop stupid.

Which one of you bastards swapped out my chicken noodle soup with this “cream of chicken” monstrosity?  Because this stuff is a Lovecraftian horror whose secret ingredient is human suffering.

Seriously, this is what chicken would taste like if a diabolical AI had prepared it using only a rusty, radioactive blender and incomplete recipes gleaned from the ruins of a Cold War gulag — and if the chickens themselves had cholera.

Alright, alright — it maybe isn’t THAT bad, but I was jonesing for some real SOUP, and not this puzzling, paste-based concoction.

And of course the fault is mine.  (It always is.)  I grabbed the wrong package off the shelf at Kroger when I got excited over the sale price.  A lot of Campbell’s Soups look alike.



Cover to “Detective Comics” #682, Graham Nolan, 1995

DC Comics.

batman-detective-comics-682-troika-part3-dccomics-dixon-nolan-hanna

A Yuletide Flu.

So I had a Merry Sickmas.  We think it must have been some version of the flu, though it was curiously absent of any respiratory symptoms.

Trust me — the fever, fatigue and confusion were bad enough.  (Alright, yeah, the confusion for me is sort of a constant thing.)

It turns out I’m not the only one who was under the weather.  There are apparently a couple of different bugs going around; I know people from New York to Ohio for whom contagion was an unwanted present.

Anyway, pictured below is how I turned the corner on my illness.  (It’s been a slow process, but I got sick last Sunday and I feel like I am finally almost better right now.)  A fellow writer out in Arizona sent me this delectable fudge as a Festival of Lights gift, and it was one of the first things I was able to eat.  (The tiny little spoon it came with was just perfect for beginning with little bites.)

And it was at precisely that point when I stopped getting sicker and started getting better.  Fudge is superfood.



Nurse Your Favorite Heresies in Whispers