Time Does Tell

excruciating, liberating truths

“Room with a View,” Beth Kephart, Monoprint Collage and Weave

A book I’d written in a fever dream of radical attention is not the book I’d thought I’d written. It seems an alien creature, sprawled across the screen, moving in and out of its own purpose.

How could I not have known, I think, reading the draft I’d “finished” six months ago—a draft sent out to contests, a draft hoped through, a draft I cannot rescind too soon: Please don’t read it, please don’t read me like this.

Winter had come and gone, and I did not know. Spring, with all its power. Only now, in the early dark, some part of the fog of my brain lifting, some newfound capacity to stare insurgently out of myself and back into myself, do the weaknesses reveal themselves, which is to say the uneven nature of the book’s parts, the soft stretches of its connective tissue.

The first reflex is shame. The second is curiosity. Why had some parts of the book gone wrong? (A confusion about my audience, an inconsistency in tone, an incompatible mix of brutal self-assessment and wishful yearning, an overindulgence in shape experiments.) What might the “good” parts of the book still become? (A poem (or two), a long essay, a future Substack post, a teaching tool, muslin art.) What had the process taught me about making? (Every something is as hard and mysterious as the first something; every something is hard; not every something deserves its contest; trust your poem, your art, your story, your argument, your very self to time.)

Later today there will be rain, white rain. Hard pellets. Slash stuff. There were be wind gale and the inversion of tree tops, lawn sluice, gutter rattle, bird silence, squirrel crouch, and I will sit in the very place that I am sitting now and know that it is my mind out there, being blown through, washed clean, given another trembling chance.

Late last fall I learned that a long piece that I had written—”Conversations with Women in Blue”—had won the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize for SWING Magazine, a gorgeous print magazine. I was elated. Two pages of that many-page collection are now available digitally, and so I share them here. cdn.prod.website-files.…

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Juncture Workshops Returns

One of many original William Sulit images that will be featured in the workshops.

During four Saturday afternoons this coming June, Juncture Workshops will return with a series of programs on Beauty, Relationships, and Remembrance—each designed to more deeply connect us to our worlds and our stories. To learn more and to sign up, please click this link.

In addition to the three illustrated, prompt-rich programs, we are offering sharing sessions. Please note that, while our first two sharing sessions are now full, a waiting list for a third sharing session is beginning to form. This sharing session is meant for those who have signed up for one or more of our three programs and wish to share some of their program-inspired work. Please let us know if you are interested, and we will let you know when we have sufficient interest to open that third session.

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Any new annual paid subscribers residing in the U.S. are eligible for custom art—stitched monoprints or cyanotypes, approximately 6” by 9” in dimension. Just send me a message with your U.S. mailing address, and I will get to work, with joy.

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I have written numerous books on the art of writing and of living a literary life. All can be found here.

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My handmade journals, booklets, cards, and paper art are offered here, at the Bind Arts Etsy shop.