Terrastina and Mazolli (2008)
Originally serialized online, Terrastina and Mazolli chronicles a year in the life of a free-spirited couple, their five-year-old twin daughters, and the odd and charming members of the small Northwest town where they make their home and operate The Brew, a coffee shop and popular local hangout. Terrastina is an artist juggling her creative aspirations with making a living and providing for her children. Mazolli adores Terrastina and his daughters and spends his time working or concocting schemes (that usually fail) for making some quick money. We follow Terrastina and Mazolli as they cope with their growing and energetic children and work hard to keep their business afloat. Then, in a risky move opposed by most of their customers, they decide to transform The Brew into The Gallery, where Terrastina can sell her art. This is a warm and quirky tale, told in 398 99-word episodes. The print edition has bonus features, including an interview with me and an episode commentary, just like on DVDs! Available at Amazon.com. Just click on the title above.
Love Life (2005)
Love is that sobering and paradoxical state of being in which one’s own happiness depends upon the welfare of another. My third volume of poetry examines love in its many guises: familial, romantic, and Platonic. This is probably the most personal of all my books. I write of my eternal and sustaining love for Kim. I have a poem about the fierce and caring love of my mother for me. I write of the occasional failures of love: the time my father came looking for me, for a connection, and I did not know how to approach him. We are born craving love, but we have to learn to give love, and sometimes the lessons are difficult to assimilate. The book is presented in three section: “Preliminary Observations,” “Field Work,” and “Practical Application.” These are the three stage of learning to love. As young people we see others and how they love, but do not understand. As we grow older, we begin to see how love is a force of nature. Finally, if we have been paying attention, we are ready to love others truly and well.
Fantasy Life (2004)
Barbie’s retirement. A weeping Bigfoot. Gambling fairies. Love sick giants. All this and more in a book of poems exploring the fantastic side of life. This is where I let my imagination really run free. Unhindered by conventional notions of reality (whatever that means) I write poems about monogamous house keys, the moon in my living room, and the secret lives of telephones. They have them, you know. When you’re not looking, they laugh at you. But don’t worry, they aren’t nasty or dangerous or anything like that. They’re just kind of melancholy with the weight of all the words they have to carry around, and they need some humor to relieve their heavy hearts. Read more about it in this volume, along with ghost stories, angels, a cosmic glutton, Pegasus, Albert Einstein, and Ray Harryhausen. Really.
Animal Life (2004)
I wanted to put together a book of my poems and started going through the ones I had written up to then, looking for good ones that would go together. It didn’t take long to see that I had many many poems about animals. I had no idea this was such an important theme for me, but I didn’t fight it. I came up with the title almost immediately after seeing the theme pop out at me. I could have made the book twice as big, with a lot more animal poems, but chose to include only the very best ones I had. This collection contains “When I Was,” my most popular and often requested poem. People use it for religious rituals and it was dramatised on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, which was a real kick for me. I drew the cover image myself, mimicking the look of the native petroglyphs gracing many of the rocks in the Columbia River Gorge.
