Updates on Tree Fall with Birdsong

Today is a big day in the life of Tree Fall with Birdsong. Yesterday was the official launch at Fernwood Press, which meant my book page went live on their site, and as of today, the “purchase” links were active in their online store. Order your copy today! You’ll see that purchasing goes through the parent company, Barclay Press. I’ve updated my book page with the link, and of course have been posting about it, including a SubStack post, which I won’t duplicate here.

The other big news is that an interview I did for Rooted Magazine was published this morning. It’s wonderful of Lauren Rhoades to feature me and let me talk about my book, and the timing couldn’t be better. Review copies go out to reviewers this week, too, and I’m busing lining up some more publicity this way. Look for another interview sometime this summer, and more news on bookstore readings and other events. So far, I’ve scheduled June 5 at Friendly City Books and July 24 at Lemuria Books. Since I’ll be on sabbatical in the fall, I’ll be looking to travel around Mississippi and beyond, so I’m hoping to book a quite a few readings at bookstores, libraries, and colleges.

The Unboxing of Tree Fall with Birdsong

box of books, unopened

Yesterday, I posted my first unboxing video to social media. I found the whole process a little weird, but also exciting, obviously, since I was opening my box of author copies that my publisher had sent. I should say, 10 are free author copies and the rest were happily bought at my author discount so I’ll have some to give away and to sell at events where I can’t work with a bookstore.

You’ll notice from the package label, if you can make it out, that the books were shipped from Barclay Press. That’s the parent company of my publisher Fernwood Press, which focuses on poetry. Barclay Press is a Quaker press, and publishes mostly nonfiction, as I understand it. My publisher, Eric Muhr, works with both.

The only thing unnerving about the unboxing was recording video with my phone with one hand while using the box cutter to open the box with the other and also narrating what I was doing. I guess I can walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time, sort of, though I don’t know if I was terribly eloquent while doing so or perfect with my camera work. If raw and unscripted is the vibe you should be going for in an unboxing video, then I guess I got that right.

Tree Fall with Birdsong in the box: two stacks of books.

The exciting part was seeing my books in the flesh for the first time. That is a moment every author savors. All the work of many years, including the multiple revisions — in this book’s case, revisions brought on both by submitting to publishers through multiple rounds and by the events that took place in the intervening years, including the loss of my mother this year — has finally come to fruition.

As exciting as it is to see a book, though, it is even more exciting to hold it in your hand, to feel the heft of its 106 pages, and to feel the texture of the cover and the pages as you flip through them. It’s not like I have to read each page to know what is in the book; I’ve reread it multiple times in recent days when proofreading, and of course I’ve read every poem many, many times while working through revisions.

I have to thank Fernwood Press for the remarkable job they’ve done with the book’s design. They are incredibly thoughtful and creative, and I couldn’t be happier with my choice of publisher and their choice of me as a poet to add to their list. It’s been fabulous working with them so far, and I look forward to working with them throughout the life of this book.

If anyone wants to watch the video, here it is from Instagram. If there is a criticism of my technique, it is probably that the only part of me that gets in the frame are my hands (or left hand, actually). That may be for the best, though. For now, let the the focus be on the book.

Tree Fall with Birdsong Page

As we inch towards the release date for Tree Fall with Birdsong (May 13 from Fernwood Press’s website and May 21 from bookstores), I’ve been updating this site to add a new page for the book. I will have information on how to order directly from the publisher as soon as that’s available, and I’ve already been able to add links for pre-orders at Bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble. I’ve also seen the book listed at Amazon and Walmar, and even at Saxon, a bookstore in Copenhagen. I’ll let people search for it there and instead promote shopping at your local store through Bookshop or at least ordering through your local chain store (Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million).

If you’re looking for a good, local place to purchase and you don’t have a store near you, please consider Friendly City Books, Square Books, Lemuria, or The Author Shoppe. I have a first reading set up for Friendly City Books on June 5 and am working scheduling readings around Mississippi, North Iowa, and elsewhere.

If you would like to bring me to your book club, library, community college, university, or just about anywhere else, drop me a line. I will be on sabbatical for Fall 2025, and am happy to travel.

Happy with Square

As I gear up for the releast of my new poetry collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong, I’m trying out Square as a way to accept credit cards. So far, it’s going great.

Let me back up and explain. It’s been awhile since I’ve been on a self-promotional book tour, and when I’ve done readings recently, it’s usually been in conjunction with a bookstore so I don’t have to worry about sales. But this month, I was invited to give a reading at Jackson State Community College and asked to bring my own books. I was happy to do so, especially since I’m hoping to have more opportunities like this once Tree Fall with Birdsong is released next month.

My one concern about selling books on my own, I might need to be able to take credit cards. In the past when I sold books, cash and checks were still more common, but these days, I wasn’t so sure. After looking around at different options, I landed on Square, mostly because of their fee structure. I will pay for every transaction, but the cost is worth it. What they don’t require is a monthly fee or minimum to be on Square. Because my personal book sales are likely to be sporadic, this is essential. My sales volume will be low enough that a monthly fee would almost certainly wipe out any profit I could make, but with this pricing structure, I only get charged when I make a sale.

There is a Plus plan that costs $29.99 per month, and I’m sure it is worth it for businesses of a certain size, but for my needs it would be overkill. They gave me a month’s free trial, which I’ve canceled.

Setting up Square was relatively painless. I was able to add three books, enter a starting inventory quantity and prices. I even added a couple of discounts so I could quickly sell two or three titles at a discounted rate. And because my iPhone SE 2nd Gen is able to take contactless payments, I was able to start taking payments without any additional equipment, which turned out to be essential.

The one issue I had was that they sent me the wrong type of stripe reader initially. They send the USB-C version, and I needed the lightning version. We got that corrected, so now I have the right one, but it didn’t arrive in time for the reading. Nonetheless, I was still able to take contactless payments with just my phone.

The reading was great. We had a small, attentive crowd, and several people bought books. Most came with cash, so maybe all my preparation was for nought, but one person did pay with a card, and that went through without a hitch. I charged him $15 for the sale, and in a day or two, the money appeared in my bank account, minus about 50¢ for the processing fee and Square transaction fee. And now I know it works, so the next time I need to sell books on my own, I’ll be ready. If I do encounter someone who can’t do contactless payments, I’ll even have a stripe reader, as long as I don’t forget to bring it with me.

As an added benefit, I could start taking payments for books online and sell from home. I’m not sure I want to mess with that, since it would also mean mailing them, but it would be an option if I get ambitious. And if no one buys online (or if they do infrequently), I still won’t have a monthly fee, so I won’t be out any money unless I actually make a sale. For that reason alone, I highly recommend Square for anyone who wants to occasionally take credit card payments.

Author Websites

How many of you already have an author website? Jane Friedman brought this up in her Electric Speed newsletter, which gave me the impetus to write about it to my MFA student, and I thought I’d add a little more here. Friedman linked to her article that encourages even unpublished authors to start a site and gives tips on what to include.

Jane Friedman wrote The Business of Being a Writer, and I got to meet her at AWP once in Tampa (briefly) when my student Katrina Byrd interned with her and blogged about AWP. Katrina even included me in one of her blog posts for Friedman. So now I’m famous, or I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame, anyway.

If you write and haven’t started an author website yet, now might be the time. If you have started one, now might be a good time to give it a fresh coat of paint, or at least give it another look to see if there’s anything you want to add or change. Friedman gives some great advice in an encouraging way, and she sets expectations low for new authors. It’s about getting started and getting used to presenting yourself publicly while no one is watching (or very few people are).

I was glad to see that she recommended the strategy I chose for my site several years ago of moving the author blog to a separate area of the site and making the site’s landing page a more static information page. I also liked her thoughts on keeping that first page limited to a brief introduction, inviting readers to dig deeper on pages like an “About” or “Bio” or “Books” page. And her overall tone suggests that an author page should reflect the writer’s personality — there isn’t one template the will be right for everyone, though following some best practices is wise.

One point she doesn’t make that I often hear is that it doesn’t hurt to snag your domain name before someone else does. If you don’t have your own yet, you might want to consider it. That might be your next step once you get your site up and running. WordPress and probably other site building services can help you with domain registry when you’re ready to do it, though some people would argue for purchasing your domain as the very first step. Owning a domain costs a little more, certainly more than WordPress’s free mode, but it can be worth it to establish your online identity before you commit to the design of your site. It would be a shame to have to change a lot about your site just because you couldn’t get the name you wanted.

Another thing this article did remind me about, though, is that even static pages need occasional updates. One mistake I see from a lot of authors is that they create an author site and 5hen let it languish with infrequent attention. I get it. It takes time and effort. I manage a few websites (my own and a few at my university), and sometimes there can be at least a corner or two that have developed a few cobwebs from lack of attention. It’s good to plan time periodically for a little spring cleaning, even if that’s just taking down old information and replacing it with something new.

Updates I’m planning for this site include and updated Author photo. I’m not planning to be like Dear Abby and keep the same photo for decades. I’m a real person, after all. And the major update will be the addition of my newest book, Tree Fall with Birdsong. I’m just waiting on the cover reveal so I can add that. I also need to add two recent anthologies to my books page: Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. I’ve blogged about both, and having a blog is a great way to keep the site current, even if I don’t post as regularly as I used to. But it’s important to gradually move news off the blog onto more static and permanent pages of the site as well.

Supercard Revisited

This just goes to show that you never know the impact of what you put online or when it might be relevant to someone again. Recently, I was contacted for help with Supercard export, thanks to a blog post I wrote nearly five years ago, back in September 2020.

At the time, I was exporting all of my data from Supercard to “comma separated value” (csv) files, so I could open those in a spreadsheet and then transfer them to a database table in OpenOffice. (I’ve since moved to LibreOffice, but they use the same formats and are essentially different flavors of the same program.) I wrote about the process because I was doing it and writing about it helped me think through what I needed to do, but I didn’t really think that anyone would be able to use it. How many people were using Supercard the way I did, and how many of those would want to move to a different platform?

Four and a half years later, I got an email out of the blue from Miki, a translator who was doing just that. They had started in Hypercard just like I did and migrated to Supercard when Hypercard was discontinued. They had what seems like a huge database of terms related to their translations. I was impressed with the way they described their Supercard stack and what they had been able to build. There was just one problem. Like me, they were working on moving to LiveCode and had hired a consultant to make the transition, but they were having issues exporting their massive amount of data in a usable form.

Miki had found my post, where I had included a screenshot of a snippet of code from my export script. They thought it looked promising, but wondered if I could elaborate. Of course, the reason I left Supercard behind was because of an OS upgrade that made it no longer work on my Mac. So I couldn’t open my projects, and hadn’t saved the full code of my export button to a text file, since I wouldn’t need it once I was done with it. I decided to send the project to Miki, and they were able to open it, share it with their consultant, and after a few email exchanges where I explained what I remembered of my strategy (after seeing the script they were able to send back to me), the consultant wrote a very simple and elegant script to export the data.

I trust they also have a strategy for bringing that data into LiveCode. As I explained to them, part of why my script was complicated was that I was trying to set up spreadsheets that would then work as tables in the relational database. I went from Supercard that acted a little like a database to one that had to actually be organized like one.

That wasn’t hard, but it did mean extracting data a few different ways. For each Place I had submitted my work, I had recorded titles, dates, and responses. For each Title I submitted, I had recorded places, dates, and responses. From that, I had to extract the data to create a table of Submissions. Each submission record would then contain the title, the place, the date, and the status (in/out/accepted/returned). I also had separate stacks for Publishers and Contests, and I wanted to combine those into one table of all Places no matter what type of place they were. I also exported a separate file with the inforation about each Place, but without the information about submissions. And I epxorted a separate file with information about each title that didn’t include the submissions.

There were a number of other things I wanted to change as I made the move from Supercard to a database, and all of that made the export a bit more complicated because I was building out three forms: Submissions, Places, and Titles. I had put all of these actions into one script so that when I flipped the switch, I could get all the data from all of my stacks all at once, creating a snapshop of all my submissions at a single moment in time.

But the main thing that Miki needed help with was how to write data from Supercard to a text file and how to organize that text file in a way that would work for their import. My original script helped with figuring out the Supertalk scripting language for this kind of operation, and I hope my explanation of what I did in the script and why I did it helped them decide what would work for their needs.

I am happy if I helped another translator and glad to be reminded of my old Supercard scripting days. Who knows, maybe it will come in handy again some day. So I don’t lose track of it, I saved the script as a pdf file so I could link to it from this post.

Eggless Pancakes

Awhile back, I experimented with making eggless pancakes one morning when I started my usual Saturday routine and then realized we had no eggs. Rather than doing the classic move of walking next door to borrow an egg from the neighbors (who does that these days?), I decided to see what would happen if I left out the egg. They turned out fine.

Considering the high price of eggs these days and the fact that I was cooking for myself this morning (and one egg in pancakes for one person leads to very eggy pancakes — good, but eggy), I decided to try leaving out the egg again, and I could hardly tell the difference.

What follows is a variation on my Cavalier Pancakes. If you’ve read my recipes, you’ll know I’m not a big fan of measuring, so what follows is an estimate of what I did. You could also take your favorite pancake recipe, omit the egg, and add a little more baking soda, flour, and buttermilk until you feel you have the volume and the consistecy you want. Maybe make the batter just a little thicker than usual to help it hold together.

For one person, I started with a slightly heaping 1/4 cup of white flour and a slightly heaping 1/4 cup of wheat flour. (Normally, I’d use a level 1/4 cup or even a little less per person). Add 1/4 tsp or less of salt, 1/2 tsp or so of baking soda, and approximately one half tablespoon of sugar. Stir with a wire whisk until well combined.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, add 1/2 to 1 tablespoon of oil (probably closer to 1/2 but you may want a little more oil than your recipe calls for to replace some of the liquid and consistency of the egg yolk). Then add vanilla and buttermilk. For one person, I used 3/4 C of buttermilk plus a dolop more.

Keep your batter a little on the thick side if you want the pancakes to be fluffier, rather than runny. This is true when you use an egg, too, but err on the side of thicker if you don’t have an egg. If your batter is a little too runny, the pancakes will still taste fine, they will just be thinner and spread out more on the pan. How much buttermilk to use might depend on how thick and creamy your buttermilk is today. I like buttermilk that’s been in the refrigerator for a few weeks and has thickened up a bit. And different brands have different consistencies. If you don’t have buttermilk, the best substitute is a mixture of yoghurt and a little milk. Keep it thick and creamy.

Then cook on a skillet as you would any pancake. People probably won’t even notice the difference.

So why put an egg in your pancakes? They are meant to add a little rise and also to help bind the batter as the pancake cooks, which I’m sure they do. But in a pinch or if the price of eggs has you down, pancakes are one thing that you can make without the egg and it won’t make a huge difference.

I’ve done the same with cornbread, actually, and that turned out really well, too. The secret is using the right amount of good, creamy buttermilk to get the consistency where you want it.

I’ve seen recipes for eggless baking that substitute apple sauce for the egg, and I have nothing against that except that I usually don’t have applesauce just lying around. I’m sure that would be good, too, but you can take your usual pancake recipe and adapt it by omitting the egg and adjusting the other ingredients a little to get the consistency you want. The results should turn out fine, and if you don’t quite like the way it worked this time, adjust a litte more or less next time until you find the way you like it.

Watch My Events Page

With a new book coming out in May, it’s time once again to brush off my Events page. I hope to be adding lots of events in the coming months,, but for now, I updated it with two exciting new appearances:

February 1, I’ll be in Long Beach, Mississippi, at Homegrown: A Writers’ Exchange, talking about Barrier Island Suite on a Walter Anderson panel.

April 1, I’ll be in Oxford, Mississippi, at the launch of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.

Keep your eyes on my Events page for more updates soon!

In Memoriam: Leone Dunkelberg

I’ve been away for the past month or so, working remotely as much as possible and taking care of my mother who, at 97, was in her final days. My brother and I were fortunate enough to be able to stay with her and care for her with the help of the team from St. Croix Hospice as her body shut down. She passed away on January 17, 2025, and her funeral was January 24. At the funeral, I was charged with giving her eulogy, while my brother, his dauther, and my son performed a song she had requested: Kermit and Zoë sang and Aidan played violin. My wife, Kim, and my niece, Elizabeth, read two of her favorite Psalms. Mom had selected several hymns and pieces from the traditional Lutheran liturgy. What follows is the text of the eulogy I wrote for her.

Leone Kathryn Dunkelberg — or Mom, Aunt Leone, Grandma, or Grandma Leone to her great grandkids — lived to be 97 years and seven months old. She was much loved by her family and was the glue that held us all together and brought us together in Osage by creating a warm and loving space in the little house that she and my dad, Albert Gibbs Dunkelberg built seventy years ago, in 1954. It was there that she raised her family, and there that she wanted to spend her final days, and we are so blessed that we were able to spend those final days with her with the whole family gathering again for the holidays.

If there is one quality that characterizes my Mom, I would say it is “caring.” Of course, she cared for and took care of her family, but I am also thinking of her profession as a nurse. Mom graduated high school in 1945 and entered nurse’s training at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines as a member of the last class of the United States Cadet Nurse program while World War II was still going on. She graduated in 1948 and began her career at the Veteran’s Hospital in Des Moines, where she would meet my dad as a patient, in the hospital for appendicitis. She also served with the Red Cross at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in the summer of 1952 during the polio epidemic, and I want to remember just how brave and selfless that was, since in 1952 the Salk vaccine had not yet been invented so exposure to polio patients came with very real risks. We can liken her work to those brave doctors and nurses who more recently were on the front lines at the height of the COVID pandemic. Mom certainly knew the risks, since my dad had recovered from polio and would walk with crutches for the rest of his life until he was in a wheelchair, and she would have known of many others who were nowhere near as lucky.

Mom continued to work as a nurse either full time or part time, working at the Mitchell County Hospital for 34 years after they moved to Osage. Even after she retired, she continued to care for friends and neighbors when they were sick, checking in on them, and helping them to navigate their treatment. I was impressed that even late into her life, when my sister had cancer or someone else she knew was on medication, she would always look it up in her medical manual, so she could be familiar any side effects and the expected benefits of each drug. Even in her final days, she was very conscientious about her own medications.

Yet there was more to being a nurse for Mom than just the medical side. She was there to take care of the whole person, and not just the physical. In talking to many of her friends in recent days, I have learned how she was there for them in difficult times, whether those were due to health issues or other trials they were going through. Mom would listen and offer advice when that was what someone wanted or needed, and she would also make sure to stay in touch and to maintain those relationships even when she was no longer able to leave her house.

This side of her goes back at least to when I was a little boy, and undoubtedly before then as well. Mom always had fruit in her yard and garden, and she was an excellent pie baker—who passed her skills down to her kids and now to her grandkids—and she often baked homemade cherry, apple, or rhubarb pies in the summer. When she did, she always made some extra crust and baked a few small pies to give out to our neighbors. She called these her “widow” pies, and she would send me or my brother to visit Mrs. Marshall, Mrs. Delaney, or Mrs. Viscosil with a widow pie as an offering. I realize now that she was doing more than giving a sweet treat to a neighbor. She also wanted us to be the ones to bring it and to spend some time with each woman when we did. We often got candy or a cookie in return, so we didn’t mind, but Mom was also training us to care for others the way she did.

Yet Mom also had an adventurous spirit. It’s hard to believe, since she was only five foot four, but she lettered in basketball in her senior year at Thornburg High School. I’m sure that entering nurses training was also quite an adventure for an Iowa farm girl. I also think of the trips she and my dad took before us kids were born, and the family vacations we took every summer, usually to visit a grandparent in California or another who lived in Florida. We got to see a lot of the country that way, and I suspect my mom did a lot of the planning for those trips, with the help of my dad and AAA. They also allowed us to host foreign exchange students when Kermit and I were in high school, and so we developed life-long friendships with George Ulrich from Denmark and Jon Morten Mangersnes from Norway. They even allowed Kermit and I to go on exchange ourselves, though I’m sure that was an even harder decision to come to. Long before that, our family had hosted Rotary exchange students from the University of Iowa at our house for Thanksgiving: one from Iran, one from India, and one from Germany, opening our cultural horizons. And after my father passed, my mother would travel to Europe when my family was there for a semester, and she would take many bus tours, mostly with groups from the bank and even go on cruises to the Mediterranean Sea, to Alaska, and to Panama, going through the Panama Canal as my dad had in his Navy days.

Mom was always open to new experiences, and she became very accepting of other people’s views and ways of life. She read widely, and was an active supporter of the arts, especially the high school and community theatre and musical productions. She also was a great supporter of our neighbor Mary Ann Marreel’s art, my brother’s acting, and my poetry. She was part of the Bread n’ More Dinner Club, who often had internationally themed meals or explored other unfamiliar culinary traditions. She was an excellent cook, and a gardener with a green thumb.

Finally, I would say that Mom loved life, yet she was also very accepting of death. She said she was ready to die, and she often told me that you never know what day you will die, that it could come at any time for her. She had a deep faith, so she was not afraid of dying, and yet in her final days, it was clear that she also wanted to enjoy each day as much as she was able. There were times when we thought she was very close to the end, yet she would wake up, ask for toast and coffee, or ask to go sit in her recliner in the living room, and even if she slept most of the day, these little things made her happy. She also took advantage of those moments of clarity and energy to give me and my brother a lesson or two, or to have one last heart to heart talk with other family members and friends. Mom lived a long life, and she lived each day well. She was humble and gracious and wise. She was always there for others, and she also took care of herself. She had an amazingly strong will to live and to stay alive long enough to be with us all again, and she did it. She said in her directives that she wanted her funeral to be a celebration of life, and she has done everything she could to make that possible. Even in death, she is taking care of us all. It is impossible to imagine a better end to a life well lived.

Postscript: of course, after the fact, there are a number of things I realized that I left out. How could you include all the memories. One was that for her 80th birthday, Mom decided she wanted to take a ride in a hot air baloon. We had all gathered in Albuquerque, and she, my sister, my niece, and I all got up very early to drive into the valley where we met the balloon. It was in the shape of a green alien, and for years, she would drink her New Year’s toast out of a champaign flute with an alien head that they gave her after that ride.

There are many more memories, like looking for birds or telling her about any sightings we had (on our drive back to Mississippi this time, we saw three bald eagles that we didn’t get to tell her about) or canning cherry or rhubarb jam every summer when we visited—I hope to do that at least one more time when we close up the house. I’m sure many more memories will come to me at unexpected moments over the next weeks and months. Mom had a good, long life, and I was fortunate enough to have her in my life as long as I did. She will live on in our memories.

Re-Release of River Hill: A Ghost Story

There is method to my madness… (I promise).

Back in 2019, I released a story one tweet at a time (on Twitter, obviously), but now that Twitter has become X, things don’t work as they used to, and I’ve moved most of my posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. (The links take you to the start of the story on each platform.) Since I’m teaching a class in digital writing this semester, it seemed like a good time to test out these newer platforms for writing fiction, so I have been reposting “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part I” on all three platforms, one post or one “toot” at a time. You can see my original post about it here with a link out to the story on X, which is mostly complete. The following links will take you to the start of the story on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, take your pick or try all three.

I say there is method to my madness because I decided to stretch the posting out over four days, and to do that, I looked for the beats in my story so I could find good places to start and stop each day. The hope, of course, is to get a few people interested with individual posts and lead them to the main story. On Bluesky and Mastodon, I can do this by including some additional hashtags on individual posts or toots (on Mastodon). I’ve used #writingcommunity, #fiction or #fictionsky, and #shortstory so far, and may try #amwriting and other hashtags today. I may see what’s trending for writers and try to jump on board.

Threads will only allow one hashtag per post, so I am using #rvrhl for all posts, just so you can pull all the story posts together with that hashtag. I’m also replying to create a thread, so that brings the whole story together on all three platforms. If you click on any post to view it, the ones in the thread before it will be above and any posted later will be or show up below. I might not need the #rvrhl hashtag now that they all collect posts into a thread like this, but I am thinking of expanding the story later with some tangentially related content, and I might do that on these platforms. If I do, then the #rvrhl hashtag will tie those other stories in with the original Part 1.

What I can do in Threads is to add a location to certain posts, so I’m thinking of doing that today instead of using a hashtag to provide a point of entry for people to find the story. The goal is to let people discover the story in different ways and to start it at different points, then go back and read from the beginning to the end or at least as far as I’ve written when they find the story.

I’m interested in how social media can be used as a kind of serialization, and how it allows readers to encounter a text in different ways and at different times. How does our understaning of a text differ depending on how and when we find it? I am also interested in linking different forms of online writing using this story.

Part 2 is already written as a Google Map project, though I might add more locations to the map that would allow me to develop parts of the story. Or I might link back out to Bluesky, Mastodon, and/or Threads to continue the story that way. One link already takes you to a website with Part 3, where you can read the story by following different paths, and there are expandable sections of the story that could branch out from that site as well. Part 4 of the story was written as a game in PlayFic format. So far, it is still unpublished online, though I’ve shared it with my students in the past, and it is playable. I’m hoping to make it more public this semester, too, so watch for a way to discover your own ghost story as a text-based game.

So far, I’ve decided to limit my re-issue of “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part 1” to the three most Twitter-like social media. This post is a way to bring my blog back into the story as a meta-story about the creation of the story. I’m also active on Sustack and have an account on Medium. Maybe I’ll decide to write some of the story on one of those platforms as well, to re-create it as a series of “Notes” on Substack or to write it in a more linear format as a series for my email newsletter. We’ll see.

It’s exciting to have two classes doing this kind of work, one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level. This gives me the impetus, and maybe some time, to develop parts of the story that I have been thinking about. I’m glad to take the time to migrate the story to these three platforms, which also gives me a way to test how they each work for this kind of writing.