Welcome!

every small town has 3 things: a bar, a church, and a rock shop

This first email typically summarizes what you are getting into by subscribing but…I don’t know what I want this to be yet. I am sure it will morph into whatever it is supposed to be gradually, as most things do. I needed to begin so that it would happen at all, you know the feeling.

I have been wanting to write a newsletter for a while now—partly because I value any method of sharing information that isn’t social media, partly because my friend Michelle inspired me to make one, but mostly because I think writing is good for my brain. And I thought this first one would be about bird watching or why I think an occasional cigarette is good for you or rocks??? but it makes sense to start with my somewhat noncommittal relationship with writing. First, I have never kept a journal even though I have romanticized the idea forever. I have bought several good looking notebooks, read published journals, and admire my friends who have an archive of past thoughts, feelings, and lifetimes. But I have never cultivated a serious writing practice of my own. 

Or so I thought…I am discovering that correspondence is my form of journaling and my main excuse to write. Primarily, correspondence via email with my friend Dan, a mechanic and retired sign painter living in West Texas and handwritten letters to my grandmother who I have been writing to for nearly my entire life. My prize from this or why I continue to write letters with an urgency and compulsion as if my life depends on it, is for the same reason May Sarton expressed (in her own journal actually) I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I think I am drawn to correspondence particularly because having another person involved keeps me accountable even under the ever-reliable bouts of depression that typically relieve me of the desire to “do.” And again, I appreciate any sort of long winded, engaged, slow form of communication.

So, in a way, I think this thing is sort of like an open correspondence, an email, or a letter, to each of you.

Taste tester:

Texas Prairie Parsley, ready to bloom.

A single, flowering cactus in the West Texas desert by Maggie.

Unforgettable, blue dickcissel eggs. Dickcissel prefer to make their nests low to the ground. This nest was nestled in a Pigeonberry, a perennial herb that grows beneath shrubs and trees.

From a reference book on how to train wild birds to feed from your palm.