Category: Writing
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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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Why “Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed” Matters
Dig.Dump.Bury.Cover. Sometimes a piece of writing begins with an image that won’t leave . . . with fish remains buried in a deep hole. In “Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed,” It was simple and exact: a gravedigger finishing the work in a deliberate sequence: Dig. Dump. Bury. Cover. Nothing added for appearance,…
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“Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed”
Originally published in Flash the Court, March 2026 Read the full essay at Flash the Court Liturgist of the Land: A Single Work Completed Look around. People are constantly checking their cell phones. Something must be left undone. A complete fucking incompleteness, a permanent, angst-driven scratch. Sisyphus whined, “In this rhythm, I am caught.”…
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When Time Has Not Been Chosen, Attention Becomes the Work
At the gym, New Year 2026, a handwritten sign invited patrons to pick up a felt pen and mark their choice on a whiteboard: 1. Relive 2025. 2. Skip ahead to 2027. Four marks beside the first. Eight beside the second. What struck me was not the count, but the absence of a third option,…
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Returning from There part iii
IT LIES . . . (Google Maps), telling me a trip from Arizona to central Wisconsin is 1800 miles and 26 hours by car. Truth is, it’s nearly 5 days Returning From There, moving from hot to cold and back to hot again. It takes a certain kind of sisu to drive that shit, a…
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The Pairings There part ii
My listening is attentive to voices talking story. Tales come from friends of many years in finely tuned narratives, arriving like rivers, landing in my head after a journey along banks that bend and rebound and then morph into chronicles of the heart. These chronicles of the heart grow from the pairings there and .…
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The Getting There part i
In the getting there, things happen on a trip to make it more interesting. A friend wrote about traveling through the Ozarks when his car’s engine repair light came on. The fix was expensive, but while waiting for a local garage to repair his car, he explored the area and ended up writing an interesting…
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IN MEMORIAM: Tim Ormson
A sad caveat to my usual statement that I have three brothers is now amended: I have two living brothers. Growing up, the sons of Dean and Dorothy Ormson were a terror to one another and their North Menomonie neighborhood. When people saw us coming, they hid the breakables. Later in life, as our parents…
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Pyramid Scheme: a date with Arizona’s mysterious pyramid tombs.
Hello Motorcycle friends. American Rider Magazine, the journal of the International Big Twin community, has published my story and many photos of an incredible mototour to Arizona’s three pyramid-tombs. These pyramid-tombs, like the people inside, are mysterious, memorable, majestic, and located in Quartzsite, Florence, and Papago Park in Phoenix. The digital version of American…