the green notebook,

, some April 2025: security issues, Nathan Whitlock quotes John Updike, and reading Beverly Dahlen,

I spent part of yesterday afternoon sitting a table as part of a “career day” at Rose’s school. One adult per table, most of whom are other parents from the larger school body, there to answer questions on what it is each of them do. Roughly twenty tables spread out through the gymnasium, others included a family doctor from Richmond, a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a lawyer, a woman with a big fluffy dog who works with training rescue animals, a chemist and a table full of people from the Embassy of Barbados. I was the poet, apparently, a table I littered with books and chapbooks, so students could get a sense of what it is I might do. With handouts, naturally. Beside me, a man who works with national security, his table empty. Everything on a need-to-know basis, I suppose. As he said, but what would he even bring? He answered questions, and showed them a picture from his phone of the building where he works.

Behind his table, where the muffins and Timbits were held, for participants. I suggested this a security issue on his end, how our side of his table wasn’t secure.

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Nathan Whitlock posts “John Updike’s #1 rule for reviewing” to social media:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

So easy, one might say. One might think.

There is an egg shortage in America, prompting the Easter painting of potatoes. Seriously.

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I’ve started working my way through American poet Beverly Dahlen’s SOMETHING/ NOTHING: Essays & Talks (2025). Dahlen’s work deserves a far wider attention, ever given the sense of a poet’s poet, a moniker both well-deserved and oddly dismissive. Post-festival, I’m pushing a series of reviews, sketching out notes on new titles by stephanie roberts, Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Jessi MacEachern, Kyo Lee, Luisa Muradyan, Jessica Popeski, Alina Stefanescu, Ashley D. Escobar, Michael Chang, Jessica Bebenek, Wayne Miller, Mahaila Smith. It goes and it goes. It goes on and on forever.