Identifying Birdsong With the help of the Merlin app, I’ve been learning to identify birdsong. I now recognize the most common birds that nest near my house; red-winged blackbird, belted kingfisher, American robin, house wren, Northern cardinal, Oriole, broad-winged hawk, crow, chickadee, and phoebe. I know some others, like juncos, sparrows, and nuthatches by sight […]

Finishing a Revision I’ve been single-tasking to finish the revision of a book-length manuscript. Aside aside from working on Reviving Artemis: Becoming a Huntress at Sixty, I’ve done little beyond weeding my vegetable garden, which really isn’t very different from writing. And both this draft of the book and this iteration of the vegetable garden […]

This vandal defaced the library book at least four times, each time “correcting” the author’s style, as if there’s only one way to write, inserting the word “increasing” as an adjective, editing “a myriad of” to simply “myriad” (twice), and commenting—in ink—“? It doesn’t add up.” The irony, of course, is that these intrusions on […]

A Mouthful of Words I’ve just returned from a first-ever visit to Yellowstone National Park and brought home a mouthful of words as souvenirs. Here are some of my favs: Big Sky I had a big dose of the big sky in all its variety: yellow sunshine, puffy white clouds, thunderheads, drizzle, downpours, double rainbows. […]