Essays
On form, revision, research, and teaching. Each ends with an exercise you can try today.
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Fourteen Lines at a Time
Why the sonnet works as a container for recovery writing
The sonnet's limits are the point. On meter as breath, the volta as a turn in thinking, and why a fixed form can hold what free verse lets spill.
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Writing the Rural Without Postcards
Defamiliarizing the places we know too well
Barns, fence lines, harvest light: rural poems come pre-loaded with nostalgia. Four techniques for making a familiar landscape strange enough to see again.
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The Researched Narrative
Structure, evidence, and obligation in true crime nonfiction
Notes from writing a book-length true crime thesis: the two clocks every narrative runs on, how to mark what you know from what you infer, and who you owe while you write.