Hello, oh ye Steadfast Ones.

This post is to commemorate the publishing of my hybrid art/prose/poem piece “Some Verses Regarding the Township (and Immediate Environs) of Bear Creek” in The Bear Creek Gazette.

I’ve been a fan of the Gazette for a long time: it is a pure labor of love organized by the wild mind of Stuart Buck, and it often publishes curiosities and hybrid pieces. When I happened to post a link to an earlier publication on Twitter, Stuart reached out and asked if I had ever submitted anything myself.

I hadn’t. So I sat down one night and began writing some words that didn’t exist. They turned, unexpectedly, into a quintet of poems, all of them somehow linked back to the mysterious township of Bear Creek. After they fell into a place, I started having these flashes of visions: a notebook with its pages torn out, a wrecked pickup truck. A stream, leaping and gurgling, in the middle of a dense pine forest. A comet, streaking overhead like a luminous worm wriggling across the night sky.

All this to say:

If you like weird nonsense words, lots of tiny circles, and a weird backstory, go check it out. The link is here.

As always, submissions (and rejections) continue to flow in and out of my mailbox. I’m excited about a number of projects that I’m working on, and the seasons continue to wheel on. It’s hot here in North Carolina. I don’t know about wherever you’re at. One of my ghosts keeps whispering to me about New England summers. The bright blue sky. The waves in the harbor gently knocking at the pilings of the pier.

More news when it becomes available.

(Oh, and if you haven’t heard about or read any of an Italian writer named Dino Buzzati, I recommend looking into him. Specifically the collection Catastrophe and Other Stories, though The Tartar Steppe is next up on my list…)