If updates be the food of love, play on.

, Christine and I read in Dublin this weekend, yes? you should come to that,

You’ve probably already heard that Christine and I are reading in Dublin, Ireland at Books Upstairs (17 D’Olier Street, Dublin 2, Ireland, D02 RX06) this Sunday, July 13 at 2pm with Irish poets Christodoulos Makris and Éireann Lorsung [see my interview with her here, by the by, posting earlier today]. Why are we in Ireland, you ask? Middle daughter’s choir is touring around and doing performances in Belfast, Galway and Dublin, so we’re shadowing, along with her wee sister in tow, attempting to remain out of the way.

Otherwise, I recently had two poems up at Blood + Honey, another up at George Murray’s NewPoetry, a further at Scrivener Creative Review and another at Colin Dardis’ Poem Alone. An interview I did some time ago, conducted by Victoria Cole for Horseshoe Literary Journal, is now online (I just found out! did you see my 2023 post from being out in Newfoundland, for their literary festival?) and interviewed again, more recently, by Mia Funk for the Creative Process. Honestly, I’ve been poem-ing up a storm since the end of April, once the first draft of “the green notebook” finished (April to April, as was my goal, although sections of such will still be posting here for another few months). The book is basically complete, I think, although I’m still working to smooth/edit elements of it, which is taking some time (more than two hundred pages of such, after all). There might be a Toronto jaunt this summer to attempt to research some of the final threads of my other non-fiction manuscript of the past year or two, “the genealogy book,” hopefully. A few things I have still to figure out, there. Oh, and the above/ground press zoom-launch I participated in, alongside Orchid Tierney, Tom Jenks, Meredith Quartermain, Brook Houglum and Sandra Doller is now online, if you want to catch that. Either see through the link, or below:

You’ve probably already heard about the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch/party, where a whole bunch of poets will be launching new poetry chapbooks at RedBird Live in Old Ottawa South on August 7th (tickets available here!); I mean, you are following the above/ground press substack for such updates, yes? And there’s only ONE MORE DAY of the great above/ground press postal increase sale (although we are still in Ireland for another week or so, so perhaps that final deadline is a bit fluid).

Don’t forget my fall poetry book, the book of sentences, is up for pre-order! I think more venues should invite me to come to read: with funding! Oh yes, we should work something out around all of that, don’t you think? Oh, and I recently completed another editing/poetry manuscript evaluation, which suggests I might be open to a further one; query, if such intrigues.

Separately, daughter and I did work through a bunch of Monty Python before I attempted to introduce her to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which she didn’t quite care for. Might she, at eleven, be too young? Might the show just be dated? Perhaps a little of both. Instead, she requested we watch a four-part documentary on Winston Churchill in World War II, which we both quite enjoyed. Who knew that would be her preference? Oh, and she won a poetry contest at her school, a week or two before the end of semester. She’s composing poems completely unprompted by us, so we think that’s pretty cool. Apparently it was open to anyone in grades six, seven and eight!