A year ago, I wrote in the margins of a poem of mine, “IDEA: Could send out as letterpressed cards . . . recipients can begin to (&, eventually,) assemble the poem whole.” It was winter and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing was still settling in me from the summer before. I was growing more . . .

I grew up on a small farm in West Townsend, Massachusetts, northeast of the Worcester Hills, at the border of southern New Hampshire. Its house and barns were built in 1800, and thirty years later, as the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution whispered through, my family erected a cooperage there among the pastures and apple trees, a small clapboard outbuilding . . .

Last night I went to bed earlier than usual. I’d avoided coffee all day so that sleep might come. Yet after half an hour of turning from side to side, the same unworthy temptation returned. To ingest something I knew would poison my soul—still, I could not restrain myself. My hand drifted back . . .

To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in Minneapolis, five times the size of the city’s police department. Earlier in the morning, . . .

I still have my first book in English, A Picture Dictionary for Children by Garnette Watters and S. A. Courtis, given to me by Mrs. Woodward, a Block Parent volunteer who lived several blocks from our home on Norfolk Street. Though I wasn’t part of the program, Mrs. Woodward had approached . . .

The subject line of the email read “Bad news.” It was late September 2025, and Baron and I were scheduled to teach a weekend writing workshop together in early October. At first, I figured “bad news” meant a scheduling conflict . . .