What are the odds of playing the exact same game of Solitaire twice? Given 52 cards, it’s beyond my wimpy powers of calculation. I play Solitaire a lot. It’s my go-to avoidance trick but this morning I was noodling around with it and it struck me that as much as I play, the random…

This weekend Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers held their 30th Conference at the Westin Hotel in Westminster, CO, a sold-out event—400 writers in the same place at the same time. The word tribe echoed through the conference rooms, but we were more like a host, an army, a hoard, bent on lending and bending ears and…

In each of the books listed at the bottom of this post, a poet serves as our witness to the world in ways that conventional news does not, cannot. The list is far from inclusive, but each book is especially meaningful to me. Most timely this summer is Sharif S. Elmusa’s Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008.…

Last week I wrote about the commercial context in which we hear awful news about Palestine, ebola, and now again about ISIS, the news worse each day. Hope, however, keeps strange company. On Monday I headed for the local library. Turns out it’s closed on Mondays. Hungry for books, I drove into Brunswick, Maine, to Gulf of Maine Books, where…

At home I don’t watch much TV. For now I am a houseguest so the television is on and I see things differently. Admittedly I watch far more HGTV than is healthy, one of my guilty vacation pleasures. But I also watch news, and this week Ebola and Gaza are the big stories. The coverage…