The serendipity of ideas is one of the things that makes libraries – and the internet – great. Come, bump up against some ideas I’ve been finding this week.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. ― Carl Sandburg Stop. Don’t go. You don’t have to be a poet to read poetry. You don’t have to understand poetry to read poetry. You just have to be someone who reads …

In 2005 on this very date, I sat down at a bulky, old, desktop computer in my family room surrounded by the noise of living, and started writing. The computer was on a file cabinet, not a desk, with no space for my legs, so I sat sideways, typing. At …

January 24-29, 2016 SOLD OUT. Email support@pattidigh.com if you would like to be on the wait list or are interested in a future such retreat. Start your 2016 off right with a tribe of writers and creatives by the sea. This “wild card retreat” was created to help all of us write …

Independence Day. It is, like many U.S. holidays, lost in part to beer and fireworks and sales, the meaning diluted or held up as a siren song for Us vs Them chest-thumping talk, the kind of talk that inevitably ends in war, in order for another independence to be won. …

One Year When I got to his marker, I sat on it, like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite. I took some tears from my jaw and neck and started to wash a corner of his stone. Then a black and amber …

One of my favorite poets and one of my favorite poems.

Singapore -Mary Oliver In Singapore, in the airport, A darkness was ripped from my eyes. In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open. A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl. Disgust argued in my stomach and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket. A poem should …

Vespers [“Once I believed in you…”] Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here, in Vermont, country of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist exclusively in warmer climates, …

Family Secrets -Toi Derricotte   They told my cousin Rowena not to marry Calvin―she was too young, just eighteen, & he was too dark, too too dark, as if he had been washed in what we wanted to wipe off our hands. Besides, he didn’t come from a good family. He …