Southern light narrates in the first-person. It is critical and interrogative. On the main level, two 4’ x 7’ glass windows flank a French door to harness the house’s southern exposure—a midday, metabolizing light that burns through surfaces and textures, leaving forms stark and full of contrast. The clear-cut outline of the windows’ frames, with their rigid lines, angle across the floor in pools of scorching light. It is cat-happy light, and salt-in-the-wound-specific.

​          — from Window: A Biography, Sonora Review (2023)

Hollywood in the High Country

As I lean down on my hands and knees and begin crawling, I no longer feel the pelt of a rain that lashes the Orkney Islands, an archipelago of Scottish islands north of the mainland. I leave behind cloud-dim light for Neolithic darkness, and enter the five-thousand-year-old chambered tomb called Maeshowe. The seeped-in light of the narrow passageway—roughly 36 feet long with a vertical height of approximately three feet—allows my eyes to adjust slowly until I enter the central, stone-built chamber.
 
​          -- from Thresholds: The (Spaces) Between, Southern Humanities Review (2022)

Into the Distance

​Weeds, saplings, nuts, leaves, twigs, branches, and once a storm-fallen tree return to my mossy oasis its natural surface and variation. In considering his garden, Thoreau claimed his daily work was “making the earth say beans instead of grass.” My work is to have the earth say moss instead of leaves. Encroachments trigger a cultivating reflex. The Zen master shakes the tree. I am Sisyphus with a leaf blower.

          ​— from The Tao of Moss, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (2020)
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​Outside the free-wheeling spirituality of Pentecostal pulpits, the odds of being bitten by a venomous snake is 1 in 37,500. Better are your odds at 1 in 36 of rolling snake eyes in a game of dice. Still, it goes without saying that no one wants to live in a house with a snake. To do so invites uneasy nights. A dangerous underneath lies in every direction. Intensities of attention multiple. And it is simply not natural.

          ​— from Visitors, Gulf Stream Magazine (2020)