Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet and essayist who focuses on issues of science and the environment, visited Smith this week to speak from her work. She had some wonderful comments during a Q&A on her writing. I always ask environmental writers how they maintain hope in the face of the immense challenges we face: species …
Health monitors to measure heart rate and steps per day are getting smaller and smaller, and cheaper and cheaper. Soon, researchers say, they’ll be the size of a band-aid, flexible, and disposable. Plus, they’ll measure chemicals in sweat that could detect stress, fatigue, or even heart or liver failure. My latest article, on new nanotechnology …
Read more “A Fitbit in a band-aid”
Latest essay at The Common Online – art and solitude in company: * Vignettes from Western Massachusetts Two men scrape blue paint from the wall of the building across the street. They sit cross-legged, each plying his scraper with energy. The one on the right is thickset, wearing a gray t-shirt stained with sweat. The …
Read more “The Company of Strangers”
This is the most intense congregation of animals I’ve ever seen. I have a piece out about these salmon today in The Common Online: Alaskan Baselines.
Poet Dean Young visited Smith yesterday and said many beautiful and interesting things about poetry during a question-and-answer session on his work. Here are some of his replies, to the best ability of my hurrying pen to capture them. * Writing isn’t separate from my life … There’s always room for writing. It’s automatic. It’s …
Read more “Always turn in the direction of the skid”
There’s something special about seeking out nature in the unforgiving seasons. In memory of winter, now that spring has at last stolen over the landscape, I thought I’d share this nature notebook entry from the last days of December. The mosses were bright green in the brief melt, taking advantage of warming. Among them I …
Latest article in the Boston Globe: Eric Schmidt, executive chair of Google, and his wife, Wendy, own the only privately-owned oceanographic research vessel on the sea, the R/V Falkor. They provide grants for ocean scientists worldwide to do deep-ocean mapping and pure oceanographic research from on board. Article Most excitingly, in my opinion, they’re now …
Read more “Diving to the sea bottom”
Just in time for the New Year: the Straw Dogs Writer’s Guild has posted an interview with me as part of a series on their volunteers. I volunteer as the emcee of the Straw Dogs’ monthly reading series & writers’ gathering, Writer’s Night Out. Interview It’s a fun start to the turn of the year …
Brazilian mystic poet Adélia Prado visited Smith College this week to share her work and thoughts with us. She gave a reading of her poetry – collaboratively with her translator, Smith professor Ellen Doré Watson – and two question and answer sessions about her work. She spoke in Portuguese and I translated on the fly, …
Read more “Adélia Prado and poetry’s core”
For the last couple mornings, with a feeling of complicated sadness, I’ve passed a downed young black birch tree sprawled halfway across the gravel drive to my apartment. It’s a beaver tree: the flakes of evidence lie scattered around the conical incision that took down the trunk as surely as an axe. It’s an old …