Watch my poetry readings on YouTube
I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of my writing and interests in culture, history and literature. To begin the channel I…
Category: Personal story
My collected poems published and on sale now
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems, 1996-2020 in both a print and e-book edition. You can…
Reflections on starting a podcast
Over the last month I have started a new venture, my podcast, The Burning Archive. I have posted links to my episodes here on the blog, and you can listen…
Announcing my podcast, The Burning Archive
Dear readers – you may now become dear listeners. Yes, I have started a podcast – The Burning Archive podcast. You can listen at Spotify, and all the other podcast…
Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of…
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts – or let us call them essays – on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming…
On living not by lies
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not…
Dream. Life. Recovery.
For several years in my early thirties, I attended a dream group with the Jungian psychotherapist, Peter O’Connor. Peter, who is now retired, was a gifted therapist who for many…
This grey spirit seeking a sinking star
But more so than the moulted carapace of governing that lies at my feet, I connected to the adventurer of the spirit, weakened by age and misfortune, that Tennyson saw in Ulysses. It was this grey spirit that I turned to this morning for the courage to continue.
Taking time with Szymborska
I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an…
Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin…
The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing…
