This January I got to chat with Thom Francis Job—one of the Albany area’s busiest champions of poets and writers—on his Sanctuary Radio program, which you can listen to RIGHT HERE! We talked about Albany, hometowns, personal growth, my books, and hitting the road to travel and accrue experiences worth writing about, and then Thom boiled it down to about 11 minutes of the best bits from our chat. He also included my reading of “Albany,” a poem I performed at The Linda in December of 2021. The poem also appears in my book, Both Ways Home. It was a pleasure to chat with Thom, who is always collaborating, networking, publishing, and hosting one thing or another to promote poetry in our area as part of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. I hope you’ll drop in and give our talk a listen, and be sure to check out the other writers he’s interviewed. It’s an excellent series that encapsulates the wide spectrum of talent across the Capital Region of New York.
New Interview with Pine Hills Review
In a recent interview I gave to Jasmine Bates of the Pine Hills Review, I urged younger artists and writers to take to the road, travel, live somewhere new, and spend some time living a life worth writing about as early as they could. There are always risks involved in doing that, in quitting jobs and driving cross-country, but there are risks involved in staying put as well. Risk and mistakes are unavoidable, so why not go through with it and have something interesting to say afterward? But even with all my running around and zig-zagging around the country in my 20s, I kept ending up in two places, my two hometowns, which was the focus of my latest collection of poetry and fiction titled Both Ways Home. We talk about that in the interview as well, and I’m very honored that a hometown publication like Pine Hills Review took the time to talk about the book and my process. They’re a stellar literary organization and I hope you enjoy the interview.
New Interview With Albany Poets
Last month, Rebecca Schumejda took a few minutes to interview me about one of my latest books (Feral Kingdom), my online literary journal Hobo Camp Review, my bookshop review blog The Bookshop Hunter, and other projects I have coming up with poets Kevin Ridgeway and J Lester Allen. The interview is now posted over at Albany Poets, the best website for finding out what’s going on in the literary world in upstate New York. They do a lot of great things for the community and I hope you’ll check them out. Thanks for reading!
New Interview with NY Writer's Com.pen.dium
I recently had the pleasure of having a great phone chat with Jeff Doherty, one of the young writers over at NY Writer’s Com.pen.dium, a growing literary website highlighting events, writers, workshops, and publications in Upstate New York and beyond. Jeff threw some excellent questions my way about my writing inspirations, how writing evolves over time, how technology can help or hinder a writer, and also about my latest collection of short stories, Nights Without Rain. Our interview, titled “From Mysterious Figure to Mysterious Author,” is now posted at their website, and I hope you’ll take a look at their other interviews, write-ups, features, and literary event listings. My thanks to the editors and Jeff for reaching out! Enjoy!
My "Talk With Me" Interview with Marcia Epstein
Today I had an incredibly fun interview with Marcia Epstein on her hour-long "Talk With Me" podcast, where she speaks with poets, writers, and artists about their work, their lives, and how the two intertwine in happy, frightful, productive, and connective ways. We spoke about Hobo Camp Review and how it all began, my upcoming collection of poetry We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine (which will be ready to release VERY soon!), and about my experiences going through cancer and trying to maintain some sort of "normalcy" in both writing and social aspects of my life, and also about trying to decide when, why, and how I wanted to share these experiences with those around me. It's the first time I spoke about all this in such a public way, and many of the poems I read on the show are about this time in my life as well. I hope you enjoy listening. You can also download the show at iTunes, I believe. A big thank you goes to Wolfgang Carstens for connecting me with Marcia. Wolfgang is a kickass poet, the editor of Epic Rites Press, and a Hobo Camp alum, so please look for his work! As far as my book, Bud Smith and I are in the final proof stages and it's almost ready to launch. I'll be giving away free extras with the first wave of books going out the door - more details about that soon. Thanks very much!
Guest Blogger at The Poets That You Meet
Shanti Weiland graciously reached out to me to ask that I contribute to her blog series The Poets That You Meet, where poets talk about the inspiration and writing process behind one of their poems. My post is titled "Wading Into the Sea Change", in which I discuss my poem "The Last Appointment of the Day" and how sitting in an endless series of medical waiting rooms over the last few years made me start to take a closer look about what made those rooms so unsettling, so static, so haunting, so sad, and even at times so comforting. I also recorded an audio version of the poem (pardon my voice) which you can find in the post. I hope it's an interesting and maybe even enlightening post. Thanks for reading.
My Interview in Issue 5 of The Blue Mountain Review
The anniversary issue of The Blue Mountain Review is now live and includes an interview in which Clifford Brooks asks me about how Hobo Camp Review (my online literary magazine) came about, what advice I have for writers submitting work to magazines, what concerns I have about bad publishing practices like reading fees, and what new books I'm working on right now. The issue also includes a bunch of great poetry, fiction, other interviews, and Robert Pinksy is the featured author. Thanks for taking a look!