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Encounter Above Tintern Abbey

Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.

Sunbeams

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

This Body

My daughters want to know why I’ve started working out at the Y. I want bigger muscles, I tell them. I want to be stronger. They think this is hilarious: a forty-six-year-old man acting like he’s sixteen.

When You Get To A Fork In The Road, You Take It

“Here, take this and get out of my sight already,” he’d yell, pushing money into my shirts and pants. I learned to keep my opinions to myself. I also wore clothes with lots of pockets.

Loyalties

I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.

Living The Writer’s Life

If you make effort, beings seen and unseen will help. There are angels cheering for us when we lift our pens, because they know we want to do it. In this torrential moment we have decided to change the energy of the world. We are going to write down what we think.

Wild Mind

An Interview With Natalie Goldberg

Wild mind is the huge place where we really live. We are always listening to what I call “monkey mind,” which is constantly saying, “I can’t write, I don’t know how, I don’t want to.” But there’s this huge mind that’s available to all of us, where all things — animals, rocks, us — are interconnected and interpenetrated. This is what we have to connect with in order to write.

Shadows

Letter From A Mailbag

It was a dare. A dare I gave myself, but still a dare: “I will ride in a mailman’s pouch all day, and write an article about it for The New Yorker.”

Utne Reader’s 1991 Alternative Press Award For General Excellence