Category: Lyric Essays
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Team Flame Takes the Field for The Twin Bill
Today is publication day, and I am delighted to share that my essay, “Team Flame,” appears in Issue 24 of The Twin Bill. The Twin Bill is a literary quarterly devoted to baseball writing and art. Each year, the journal releases a special issue on the day of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, bringing together…
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Baseball and Cuisine Share One Necessary Ingredient: NOSTALGIA
Baseball and Nostalgia In 2020, I came across a brand-new literary baseball publication started in New York, The Twin Bill. It was started by Scott Bolohan. Immediately, I was enthralled by an online magazine focused on writing and baseball, two of my favorite subjects. So I submitted a piece, “The Diamond Speaks in Runes,” and…
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Nothing Is Forced into Action Except the Old Boat Motor
At the cabin, stories rise the way ghosts do. Nobody can produce them on demand. They are, like the Dylan lyric about sons and daughters, “beyond our command.” They flash across consciousness, drift back into the trees, return when they are ready. This is why I come again to Big Casey Lake, to the Old-Style…
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Lightning Bolts and Scars
Lightning Bolts and Stars, a word and music piece by Gregory Ormson, Russell Thorburn, and Darrell Syria, guest on electric guitar. Listen in to this spoken word piece, a precursor to the lyric memoir, Stories Emerge Like Bears, Gregory Ormson’s forthcoming book by Cornerstone Press, UW Stevens Point. Lightning Bolts and Scars, originally published online…
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Why Liturgist of the Land
A Single Work Completed Does anyone experience a single work completed? A work done so perfectly that nothing more needs to be added or taken away. In my recent lyric essay “Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed,” the entire meditation turns on four actions. They form the simplest structure of labor I have…
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Excerpt, A Motorcycle Ride in Mexico
Dust eats away at my skin. The leather I wear makes every minute an inferno on the motorcycle. Heat explodes up my ass, creeping past crack and sack to pillage my spine and overburden my shoulders. But I am an adult, I am in Mexico, I have documents and a clean record; I can drink,…
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Playing Catch: A Simple Magic Endures
Days up in the trees are coming to a close for Debbie and I. We’ve done zero to 61 in about 30 days. That’s not a measure of speed but a marker of age for the people we hold dear. To be exact, it goes from six months to 61 years. Here, a short video…
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The Diamond Speaks in Runes
And the Diamond Speaks in Runes By Gregory Ormson If my friends could get out of their summer houses, we met at the diamond to sharpen the angles of our wild fastballs. The guts of our dirty brown ball unraveled like a tongue, wagging at the glove skipping by, hurling past the catcher in angry…