I’m a writer and librarian from Denver.

I’m unoriginal as a reader, and all the authors you’ve heard of and which everyone thinks are good, I also think are good, but especially: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, Denis Johnson, Zadie Smith, Ted Chiang, Gene Wolfe, Joy Williams, Frederick Buechner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Portis, Barbara Pym, Les Murray, G.M. Hopkins, P.D. James, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.F. Powers, J.L. Carr (bit of an alphabet soup there), Saul Bellow, Connie Willis, Daniel Woodrell, Don DeLillo, Shirley Jackson, Ross Macdonald, Susanna Clarke, Annie Dillard, Gloria Naylor, Thomas Pynchon, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Austen, Chekhov, your mom, your dad—everyone! I’m a lover. Except for Grapes of Wrath. What a trash heap.

The below is a poem I think is fun.

FABLE FOR BLACKBOARD by George Starbuck

Here is the grackle, people.
Here is the fox, folks.
The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox
hopes.

Here are the fronds, friends,
that cover the fox.
The fronds get in a frenzy. The grackle
looks.

Here are the ticks, tykes,
that live in the leaves, loves.
The fox is confounded,
and God is above.