4,215 Blogger posts later, I'm starting clean with a new website

My friends, the time has come.

All of these thousands of posts, over the course of these dozen years. Celebrations of books I've loved, of friends I've made, of kindnesses that have been extended my way.

It's all become a bit much—overgrown, weedy, unkempt.

And so, after cleaning out my father's home and then my own, after thinking hard about who I want to be in the days I still have, after writing and publishing a Woven Tale Press essay called "Clean" about all the things I am learning to leave behind, I am also leaving this blog behind. I'm moving on with a simple web site, which I invite you to enter here.

All thanks to each of you who took the time to stop by, to comment, to share.

All thanks to the friends I made through the books we loved.

All thanks to my husband, who has sat with me and built this new site, scrubbed it down to the essentials. Let the reviews and stars of bygone years be bygone. Let the nuggets of thought get tucked into time. Let the photographs recede.

It's time to start fresh again.

The blog will remain live for any who want to sift back through. But I will no longer be adding to it.

Excerpts from eight of my books can be found on the site.

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on spiraling toward the essential, in "Clean," a new essay for Woven Tale Press

What a blessing it is to work with Sandra Tyler at Woven Tale Press. She looks at every word, scours every sentence, asks, and asks with kindness. "Clean," my essay up today on her beautiful literary site, is so much better for having had her graceful interventions.

With thanks as well to Angelica Gonzalez—reliably kind.

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three things loved, three things hated: Kate Northrop's haunted poetry

Out in Wyoming, where Alyson Hagy lives and teaches and writes, there are many very real, very committed artists.  One is named Kate Northrop, a poet with whom I have enjoyed a correspondence. 

Her poems have been called "haunted."  They have been likened to "the penumbra in painting, where light and shade blend." They have been described as "inclusive and generous, yet the tension, the thrill, never slackens."  Kate herself has been hailed as a poet with a "remarkable ability to combine erudition and empathy."  Last year she sent me an early copy of what would become the Persea publication Clean.  I read it in a sustained state of awe.

Today, thinking of Kate, I returned to Clean—the manuscript she'd sent—and found this page, these words.  I'm teaching this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I'm taking Kate's words with me.

The first day they had to name
Three things they loved, three
They hated

Loved:  pulling moss from the seams
Between bricks; a stone
Cracked open; Jello, when you touch it

With a spoon, how it resists

Hated: a too-visible part
On the girl in front of you, scalp;
The skin formed on house paint;

Feet; white condiments

(Miracle whip, tartar sauce, mayonnaise)

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