I’m bored. Really, really bored.

Since the cases of COVID went back on the rise about a month ago I’ve been put back on shelter-in-place orders. Since my transplant I’ve been immunosuppressed, so I have to be […]

You tiptoe back towards religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and p […]

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
Love is not merely an emotion. It is a meltdown that reestablishes a more unified space of brilliance, goodness, and sadness. This is the real function of love […]

On walks, I find feathers, seed pods, pieces of wood, leaves, flowers, sticks, papers, plastic and metal things, pieces of glass, strings, all object […]

Travel has always been important to me. It’s about adventure, experience, and cultures that are different from my own. Cuba intrigued me for all these reasons. In 2018, I felt it would be a fleet […]

It all started when a friend in California sent me three used paperbacks that someone donated to her sidewalk library. My friend and I hoped that my nephew who is stranded here during the pandemic without school […]

I went to see the Juneteenth rally in Richmond because I’ve always been drawn to stories, to seeing things unfold. Beneath the grand statue of Robert E. Lee, a large crowd gathered. Songs were sung and w […]

When I first started writing, I couldn’t even call myself a writer. I had been NOT writing for seven years before I joined a silent writing program that I went to once a week to sit down and scrawl out a m […]

Sometimes I am asked to compare current artwork to pieces of the last few years. I can only do so in the most general terms: the images of my newer digital paintings may be a little sharper and co […]

Yasser Alaa Mobarak grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. When the Egyptian Revolution started in 2011, he was an eighteen-year-old teenager. “The protest took place in Shatby Station, Alexandria. It called fo […]

I run a writers’ retreat in a nineteenth-century farmhouse on the James River in Norwood, Virgina.  My quarters are at  the rear of the three-story house and consist of a large country kitchen with a woodstove, a […]

If you’re a writer with even minimal involvement in the online writing community, chances are that you’re familiar with the terms, “plotter,” and “pantser.” And if you’re a plotter who manages to successfully […]

Right now, sitting in my armchair, I’m imagining myself at the Camilla House bed and breakfast in Penzance, listening to Fiona, the charming proprietor, as she tells me about her favorite local restaurants and p […]

March 19. It was the first day of spring. Cardinals trilled at dawn. Trees were starting to smudge pink, white and green. I smelled mulch, and fresh, overturned earth. Beauty and hope were in the a […]

I just wrote a new book of poems called Celestial Navigation. One of my favorite stanzas says:

Penguins man the caps,
huddle
against the wind, sheltering
downy chicks
flaunting their […]

Photography for me started as a hobbyist’s yearning for perfectionism and how to depict it using one of the simplest formats—the photograph—rather than any real try at becoming a profes […]