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.

Four Poems Newly Online

Not too long ago, I discovered that four of my poems are now available online. I have a Google alert set up for my name, and though it usually doesn’t show me much that’s interesting or that i don’t already know about, occasionally, it proves valuable. That’s how I discovered that the University of Alabama Birmingham has made their back issues of Birmingham Poetry Review available online through their Digital Commons. This includes two poems of mine from 2004 and two from 2023. I’ve added these to my online poetry page. I’ve also added a few more recent online publications.

But I thought I’d post about it on my blog as well, especially since, you can search on “Birmingham Poetry Review” at the UAB Public Commons, and you can access any issue back to 1998 so far. This is an excellent resource for a huge amount of great poetry. Until now, BPR was print only. This makes it more accessible to many more people.

Why I’m Switching from InDesign to Affinity Publisher

The short answer to this question could be that Adobe is raising the price of Creative Suite, but I have been considering this move for quite awhile, even before Adobe announced its price increase.

I’ve never been happy with Adobe’s subscription pricing model. Granted, it’s a good deal if you use all that Creative Suite has to offer, but who can really use it all? I primarily use InDesign and Photoshop, with a little bit of Illustrator. I mostly publish two little magazines and do publicity for my university department using Adobe. For a long time, they were the only thing powerful enough to do what I needed, but now Affinity has come out with a very strong competition, and they charge a single fee for a license. Yes, I may need to pay to upgrade in the future, but I won’t pay every year, and Affinity’s one-time price is much less that an annual subscription for Creative Suite.

I finally broke down and bought it this summer, when they had a half-price sale on the educational price. It was affordable enough that I could justify paying for it so I could really test it out (more than I could do when I had a one-week free trial). And I could recommend it to my students because they can get what they need for one low price. I needed to own it if I was going to ask them to use it, since I knew there would be some issues to work out.

But I’ve been very happy with using Affinity Publisher and Affinity Photo so far. (I haven’t dug into Affinity Design much yet because, as I said, I don’t really use Illustrator very much, but I’m glad that I can use if it I need to create vector graphics.)

I’ve learned the most about Affinity Publisher, and though it is a little wonky (so is InDesign, but I’m familiar with its wonkiness), I’ve found it to be pretty intuitive. I have to get used to some things that are different, but some of those things are actually better for my purposes. I just learned about how to format a table of contents and have Affinity Publisher generate it. That works very well, and though I still end up ‘fixing’ a few things in the output for the TOC, I don’t have to edit it as much as I did in InDesign.

Page numbers and styles also operate a little differently than they do in InDesign, but they are close enough, and as I learn more about how to use them, I’m starting to forget how I did things in InDesign and am happy with Affinity. I have learned about a few bugs in Publisher, but there is a good user support forum for Affinity products that has been very helpful.

One thing that has made my transition easier is that importing files into Affinity has been fairly simple. For InDesign files, you do need to export the file in IDML format. Once I do that, I can then import it into Publisher and most things are carried over, including my page setup, margins, master pages, and my paragraph and character styles. And importing Photoshop and Illustrator files are even easier, since you can just open them in Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer. This means all I really need to do is to save my InDesign files as IDML formatted files before I cancel my Creative Suite subscription. That will be easy enough to do, and from tehre, I can create new documents in Publisher.

New Poems in Salvation South

I’m thrilled to see two new poems appear in Salvation South. If you’re not familiar with this weekly online journal, I highly encourage you to read the most recent issue, and not just because they took my poems. In this issue, John T. Edge interviews Wright Thompson about his new book The Barn, which explores the murder of Emmett Till. There is also nature writing from Lenny Wells and an interview with musician Caleb Caudle conducted by Chuck Reece.

My humble contribution are two poems from my “Intergalactic Traveler” series. The first was inspired by stories I’ve heard from people who’ve visited Buc-ee’s. If you haven’t driven through the South, then you may not know what I’m talking about, but just ask anyone who has, and you will likely hear similar stories. I have been amazed by the reverence and fervor people show for this institution, even friends who I would not expect to wax enthusiastic about a truck stop.

My second poem was written in response to the shooting at Uvalde, though sadly, there have been many other incidents that it could be about.

This series of poems arose out of an exercise I gave myself in 2019 to write from an alien perspective, to write in a different voice, and to take on issues that I might feel less comfortable writing in my own voice. Interestingly, after some years of writing in this series (now totaling more than twenty poems), I’ve also written about some of these issues in first person from my own perspective as well. Writing in this voice also was likely instrumental in some of my poems based in myth.

I thought I was done with my intergalactic traveler, when I saw a call from Salvation South and felt the need for a Southern-inspired poem, which led me to the one about Buc-ee’s. Who knows, maybe I’m not quite done yet…

I’m very grateful to Salvation South for making this mental leap with me and allowing these poems to grace their virtual pages. I hope you’ll enjoy them, and I hope you’ll become an avid reader of Salvation South. The editors there are creating an amazing space for challenging conversations.

How to Choose a Headshot

A week or so ago, I started down the path of choosing a headshot for my next book of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong. After taking tons of pictures using my Nikon and the self-timer, I narrowed them down to four that I thought were decent, and then decided to get some more opinions. So I hopped on Substack and set up a poll with a post about needing a new picture, not wanting the poet glam shot, and instead wanting to look like a normal person on my book’s cover.

The nice thing was that quite a few people took the poll and others commented on my cross-posts on other social media platform. I even got some more subscribers to my free Substack, which I’m planning to use mostly to get out news about the book and book events. And even nicer, the voting clearly favored the picture that I was leaning towards, too. But the comments, which got into some issues of exposure and balance, did make me ultimately decide to try again. So I added a new post and another poll with four new pictures, plust the option to stay with the first choice.

Of course, my publisher will undoubtedly have the final say, and that choice may depend as much on other design choices for the cover as it does on the photo itself. I had seen authors give readers choices about cover design or author photos in the past, though, and this seemed like a good way to drive some engagement and get people excited. No matter what happens with my photo, even if my publisher ultimately tells me I just need to get a professional photographer involved, letting people in on the process and on the decision can’t hurt, and it’s actually fun. So I highly recommend having a poll or asking for comments about your headshot the next time you need one.

If you’re not on my Substack already, please go there and help me choose the best photo!

Possumtown Book Fest

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking part in the Possumtown Book Fest, August 24. Friendly City Books is organizing this event at the Columbus Arts Council, and Emily Liner asked me to be part of a panel on Walter Inglis Anderson. I’ll be talking about him and my book of poems, Barrier Island Suite.

Thanks to this invitation, I’ve updated my Events page for the first time in awhile, adding the panel to my calendar and posting a few more details above in the description area. That page is about to get more activity as I gear up for the launch (next spring) of Tree Fall with Birdsong. I’m glad to see it still works the same way it used to. That’s been one place I’ve kept track of readings and other appearances related to my writing.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I don’t write a lot of personal posts on this blog, since I try to stick to writing about poetry and MFA programs, but over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been able to get away for a bit and take much needed vacation to Belgium that I wanted to write about — and I promise this does have a connection to my poetry.

You see, Belgium is like a second home to me, but one that I don’t get to see nearly often enough. It’s been a dozen years since I’ve been back, thanks to a number of things that got in the way, including that little pandemic that we’re not 100% over. So it was high time I returned with my family to visit friends and reconnect with some of the places we love most.

I first went to Belgium as an exchange student, and I still am in touch with my host-mother, Jenny, and my host-brother, Frank. I lived there for a year again when I was on Fulbright to Ghent to research my dissertation, the translations of the Collected Poems of Paul Snoek, and again for six months when I taught as a Fulbright professor in Leuven and Antwerp. The last time we were there was with students in a month-long study abroad program that we took to Brussels, where I got to brush up on my French. But this time we returned to Ghent and to Leuven, visited Frank and his wife Sabine, saw their kids Fritz and Tessa, and even met their significant others. It’s amazing that they are both accomplished young adults, and that Frank and I (and our spouses) are now starting to contemplate retirement.

When Tessa was 18, she asked me for a poem for her birthday. That prompted me to write “Tesselations” which will be in my forthcoming book Tree Fall with Birdsong. Other poems, like “The Rain in Flanders” are inspired by my time there while on my first Fulbright, just a year before she was born.

I don’t know if or when I might write more Belgian poems, but I’m always inspired by it and by the work I’ve done translating from Dutch. We were glad to be able to reconnect with Paul, one of Paul Snoek’s sons, again on this trip, too. It’s always great to see him and his partner, Sophie, and to catch up on their lives.

The thing about visiting Belgium is that, even when we do touristy things, like visiting the James Ensor house in Oostende or going to the War Museum in Bastogne, the site of the Battle of the Bulge, it is more like visiting a familiar place or hanging out wiht family than going on a trip. We were happy to take long walks in the countryside or around the city, visiting the universities where I studied or taught. We also stopped by downtown Brussels on the way to Leuven and spent an afternoon at the Royal Art Museum in Antwerp.

Everywhere we went was filled with memories and associations, and we wished we had more time to soak it all in. But vacations can’t last forever, just like the beautiful summer weather we had while we were there. Our first day was cold and rainy, which is typical for Belgium even in summer, but then we got sun and the heat that the Belgians had been craving, since they had had a very rainy spring. But the last few days returned to the normal cool temperatures and drizzle, as a reminder that it was time to head home, which we did with the promise that we won’t let so much time go by before we visit again.

So thanks to everyone we hung out with in Belgium this time, from my host-family Jenny, Frank, Sabine, Fritz, Lore, Tessa, and Bernard, to Paul and Sophie, and even to the staff member of the Irish College in Leuven who took us on an impromptu tour one morning that lasted nearly an hour, the owner and customers at a beer shop where we watched Belgium play in the Euro Cup one night, and the teacher at our son’s school who let us in to see his classroom that had hardly changed in nearly 20 years. It was a magical trip with amazing weather, great food, and wonderful experiences to add to our long list of memories to revisit next time.

The Meaning of Rejection

Submittable calls it “Decline.” I like to refer to it as “Returned” when my manuscripts come back to me, which they still do more often than not. As an editor for Poetry South and a frequent submitter to many magazines, I have a complicated relationship with rejection. On the one hand, I have a tough skin because I return far more manuscripts than are returned to me. I get it when magazines send my work back — there are a lot of factors that are out of my control, so I shouldn’t take it personally. And yet, there is always an ounce of regret, even when I know better, when a magazine doesn’t accept my work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of rejection more in terms of the poems I’m reading for Poetry South. Our default decline letter states that: “We know there are many excellent poems that we won’t find a place for or that won’t fit our needs for this issue.” Truer words were never spoken, and yet we also want to publish the best poems we receive. Does that mean that all the poems we send back were somehow inferior to the other poems that we accept? Not really.

You could look at the math. Right now, I’m reading for one month with over 60 submissions, which means I’m reading 240 poems. We take submissions 12 months a year. Our annual deadline is July 15, but we start receiving submissions for the following year on July 16 as of 12:01 a.m. So that means that if the month I was readng for were an average month, we would read 720 submissions and 2880 poems. It is not an average month. May, June, and July are our busiest months, when we anticipate getting 200-300 submissions a month. We’ll probably have that many from July 1 – July 15, and we get quite a few in the second half of July, too. We read year-round, though we often take a break from reading in August – November while we concentrate on putting together the next issue. What that means is that of the 240 or so poems that I’m reading right now, I can probably accept ten or fewer, since we aim for about 100 pages of poetry in our annual issue. There are tons of really good poems that I won’t be able to accept simply because if I did, I would fill up the magazine in no time.

Do we pick the best? We try. We are also human, and we are also trying to select the best poems for our next issue. That means that some really good poems won’t be selected. Some of those might be better than what we select but might not be a good fit for Poetry South or might not be a good fit for the issue that is developing. Sometimes we might overlook a “better” poem simply because we are not the best reader for that poem. Sometimes we might overlook a “better” poem because we feel the way it is formatted won’t work well in the pages of our magazine. Sometimes we’re tired. Sometimes we’re feeling the pressure of the poems we haven’t read yet or the ones that we know will be submitted in the coming months. We do our best to pick the best, but that term is subjective and relative and unfair. Please remember that when we send your poems back to you.

We also want to support new writers or writers who’ve been around for awhile and who show promise. Sometimes we accept poems by writers who’ve been sending to us for awhile because we want to encourage them. Sometimes we accept a poem by a writer who is in high school or college that may not be objectively “the best” but that shows a lot of promise. We don’t accept poems that we don’t like or that we think won’t fit in with our journal, but we do appreciate a poem that’s a little rough around the edges at times. We’re not looking for uniformity. We are looking for variety and for poems that challenge us in new and intersting way, even if they may not be “the best.” They are all the best for us at that moment when we accept them.

I want to be excited by every poem that we publish, even if that means we overlook some really good poems by well-published poets in the process. Because we know we do. We read your bios and know where you’ve published. We try not to to be too impressed by past successes, and we try to concentrate on the poems you sent us, not who you are, but we do notice. Often after we’ve made our decision about the poems.

When I send my poems out into the world, I know they will face the same inscrutable process. I know they need to land in the right person’s hands at the right time in order to have a chance of acceptance. I celebrate when they do, and I try to get them into other people’s hands as soon as I can when they come back to me. I try to remember myself as an editor when I submit my work, and to be gracious to those editors who spend their time and energy reviewing my poems. And I try to remember myself as a submitter of poetry when I’m reading everyone else’s poems, to give them the diligence they deserve and to look for the poems that will be right for us this year. And I look for the best, whatever that might mean for me at the moment, which is always affected by all the poems I’ve been reading, accepting, returning, or holding onto so I can read again before I make a final decision.

I know I am imperfect. I know I try to do my best, and I’m proud of all the poems we’ve published in Poetry South. Whether you call it “reject,” “decline,” or “return,” I hope that all the poems that go back to their poets will find their best place to be published. There are many, many other great magazines out there, and this gives me comfort every time I hit “Deline.” Somewhere else there is a better home for that poem, and I hope that it finds its home soon.