Seven Metaphors

Teachers are great sharers—or show-offs, depending on how you look at it—and often compare the clever and cruel tasks they’ve given students. In the summer, all of these assignments float up, borne as by some ocean current to my desert island, and I plot ways to use them.
An obstetric nursing teacher once told me [...]

Oversharing Again

During my break from blogging, I’ve been thinking about blogging—more specifically why I do it and what I hope, however foolishly, to get from it. Part of what stirred my thinking was A New York Times Sunday Magazine article (“Exposed” by the former Gawker blogger, Emily Gould) and some thoughtful comments on Gould’s essay [...]

Blogolution

I’m taking ten days off from blogging to complete the work of the school year—exams, final grade reports, and the like. I will continue to post daily haiku, but my next real post will be June 4th.
This hiatus comes at a good time. Since the beginning of this blog, I’ve been ambivalent. [...]

Messages from Trouble

The blog category I least like checking is “angst,” yet angst has always been one of the chief motives behind my writing.
I’m not proud to say so. If I’m absolutely honest, I’d much rather read work that—at least sometime—promises mild weather instead of future storms, earthquakes, and suffering. The writer who relies [...]

One Year Later

Last week this blog circled the calendar for the first time, reaching its one-year anniversary on March 21st. That’s 295 posts (poems plus essays plus “finds”), 98 paintings and drawings, and 366 haiku (or 6,222 syllables).
It seems crass to reveal the number of visitors—because what do those figures indicate anyway?—and [...]

The First Word

When I was young, I dreamt of inventing an expression that would gain popularity and then—like an oddly marked bill—return to me from a stranger. I was naïve enough to believe that I could come up with something new and naïve enough to imagine saying, “Hey, I invented that” and to have [...]

On Being a Soloist

I have a bad habit of seeing only the task before me. With grade reports due at the end of the week, I can’t see past that obstacle. I know of nothing beyond it so nothing exists beyond it, and I won’t like thinking about any other tasks this week.
And I [...]

Little Doubt

A confession: sometimes I wander among quotations looking for ideas. Some other bloggers seem to possess a deep spring of subjects, but I’m always rocking the pump, lifting and pressing the handle hoping for at least mud. As much as I’ve practiced writing my way to a [...]

A Note to Image Shoppers (and others)

I searched online and found an image like the one on the left. It was over a caption that read, “By the way, here’s that Indian Head Test Pattern you’re looking for (but please, see the rest of my site first).” As my blog has also become an image [...]

Habitually Yours, Joe Felso

Before now, I’ve never been a habitual writer. Most of my life, I envied writers who pulled weathered journals from satchels and leafed through crowded pages to find clean space. They add a page in place of bowing toward Mecca or kneeling at another station of the cross.
Now that I’m [...]