From the Fields

Where does your imagining begin?

Mine begins in the fields. As a boy, I’d shoulder open the screen door of our old farmhouse and hustle down the cement steps and across the gravel road and perch on the lip of the irrigation ditch. Maybe in the wide, diked alfalfa field beyond I’d spot grouse or antelope, or maybe just study for a time the low purple flowers and the high, dry blue of the sky. On summer days I loved nothing more than wandering north through fields of wheat, grass, and scrub, wandering all the way to edge of our land, where the fields gave way to sagebrush hills.

This is the opening poem in my latest collection, Pastoral, 1994, which is the first book I’ve done that’s a straight run, a clean journey into the fields—no sections or breaks—and though you’ll find here elegies, aubades, and songs, the sonnet or the ghost of the sonnet haunts most of these poems, which explore rural spaces, rural culture, and rural identity; the late years of the farm crisis in eastern Montana; and wonder, wildness, grief, loss, ecological devastation, and masculinity.

You can find poems from the book at Terrain.org, The Sun, About Place, and Sweet, A Literary Confection. And you can listen to a conversation I had about the book with poet and editor Han VanderHart at the Of Poetry Podcast.

If you have a chance to pick up Pastoral, 1994, drop me a line. I still love to wander out into the fields and hills; I love to talk about poems too!

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Classes

There are a couple of spots left in my upcoming Zoom class for the Center For Fiction this Saturday—sign up and come write with me!

What We Really Mean to Say: Utilizing Poetic Techniques in Prose

In his seminal creative writing craft text The Triggering Town, poet Richard Hugo claims, “all truth must conform to music,” for in music, we find a fuller, stronger truth; in attending to language, we not only find more effective, vivid forms of expression but also find newer, truer things to say. In this workshop, we will discuss four techniques for attending to language and crafting evocative prose. Participants are asked to bring an essay or story in progress (though prompts will also be available at the session), as we will apply these techniques in revision and share revised work at the end of the lesson.

You can always find other upcoming classes at my events page. Super excited to be teaching week-long workshops for Orion and Fishtrap this summer!

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I’m surprised and pleased and sweetly bewildered, but enough of you have pledged paid subscriptions that I plan to turn said subscriptions on soon. My ramblings here will always be freely available, but paid subscribers will be supporting my work throughout the writing process—kind of amazing that such a thing is possible, thank you, thank you!—and I’m thinking two or three times a year I’ll gather with paid subscribers for a virtual happy hour conversation and Q&A. More to come!