I’m oddly inspired by parking lots. As I wrote in my book Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets, “Although I’ve written many nature-based poems, I find inspiration in ordinary stretches of asphalt.” Quite a few of my poems began in parking lots – “This is a Wild […]
I was an impatient child. I wanted everything, all the time, right now. Each year before Christmas, my impatience flared into full-blown anxiety, complete with stomach cramps, shallow breathing, and sleepless nights. Once I overheard my mother telling my father, “Christmas is too hard for Erica.” The anticipation […]
In the December 3, 2017 issue of the New York Times Book Review, I read these words from David Orr’s “On Poetry” column: “Poetry, as everyone knows, is unpopular.” The first sentence in an article about children’s poetry, Orr goes on to state that poetry is so unpopular […]
I’m re-launching my online presence, which includes this updated WordPress website, regular blog posts, and an enhanced, twice-monthly newsletter. The newsletter is the result of a brainstorm I had during one of my nine-hour drives between Oregon and California this fall: poetry books need more reviews! I used […]
I finished the last event of my book tour for Night Court, my first poetry collection, on Sunday, October 22 at Skyland Church in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A small, appreciative crowd gathered in the church basement to watch the videos I made from poems in the book, […]
During my October-November trip to Cologne, Germany, I rented a lavender Fiat 500 and left the city for the countryside just east of the Rhine. Called “das Bergische Land” (there used to be a fort there), its rolling hills and fields were a much-needed respite from the crush […]
One day during our most recent family vacation, my son pulled The Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick, off the shelf of a bookstore in Santa Cruz. This strange and visionary book became the unlikely diving board for my latest project, a book based on letters my maternal grandmother […]
Why Recycle? It’s a good thing my grandmother decided not to make lamps from the spent brass shell casings she found near her cabin in the Mojave Desert, a few miles from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. She had quite a collection built up before […]
I own more books than I know what to do with. I trip over them, kicking them across the floor; I find them in the dust under the furniture (“so that’s where Lord of the Flies went!”) I had a Kindle for a while, thinking it would […]
Write Like a Kid I have the two latest California Poets in the Schools anthologies on my desk: If the Sky Was My Heart (2014) and Sing to the Heart of the Forest (2013). The more I read them, the more I understand why I read them, […]
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