It’s been a little while since I shared some bummer bird poetry. This one has the marvelous distinction of having been broadcast into a dark Scottish forest. My other poems are still a little jealous. Window: White Pine I. Chaos in the predawn dark— starlings scream II. Robbing the open pinecone, rewarded again and again—chickadee […]
Kate
I had never seen or heard of cypress knees before last year, when I visited Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. It’s a beautiful place to walk around. The landscape is idyllic. Grass, grass, trees, trees, pond, swans, mausoleum, leaves, tombstone, tre—what the hell are those?
In 2016 my editor assigned me an article about a then-recently identified genetic association between three medical conditions: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome (hEDS), and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). As it so happens, I have all three of these. After minimal reflection, I decided to take a journalistic risk and […]
This is Part 2 of my interview with Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. You can read Part 1 here. Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself […]
Twenty-one years ago, Domino’s Pizza ran a fairly mundane promotion: customers who purchased a large one-topping pizza would also receive an order of cheesy bread, on the house. This event would not have even registered for me, or anyone I knew, had Domino’s not advertised it like this:
Jennifer Lunden is the author of the astounding new book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She’s also a good friend. This is Part 1 of our conversation about work, exhaustion, and writing while ill. Kate: I know American Breakdown has been a […]
This was first published October 4, 2021. It’s still the case. In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no other way of accounting for it… many individuals… have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not learned a salutary dread of him. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Darwin’s […]
A long time ago I wrote a poem about change: how necessary it is, and how excruciating it can be. How it comes on its own timeline, whether we want it or not. Writing the first draft of this poem took years, and, appropriately, the poem has never stopped evolving. There will likely never be […]