Virtual (Good) Reading

I read lot of stuff online (ask my wife). I will admit to having 200+ sites in my RSS reader, and I check my blog roll on Blogger (some overlap between the two but not much). And I follow links that look interesting. Not everything I run across is good, of course, but it’s usually fairly easy to tell. I found a lot of good things this week.

Poems, for example. I love reading poems; I love finding them in unexpected places and coming from unexpected people. Here are only a few:
• Nancy’s “goodnight” – short, simple and with a beautiful illustration. She’s a poet with words and a poet with a camera.
• Two by Justinian at Discount Verbiage (although he calls his blog something else) – “Taliessin in the School of the Poets” and “On Continuing to Grieve” (this one is beautiful). I came across his blog several weeks ago because of a comment he made at another blog, namely the one by
• Phoenix-Karenee. This week she posted “Adrenaline,” which I loved.
• Two by Kathleen Overby: “Bottle Cries” and “Shattered Glass.”
• “How Arguments Go,” by my friend Maureen Doallas.
• Pencil Drawn and Paper Grown: Poems by Heather Truett. This isn’t a blog post; it’s a book of poems by one of our TweetSpeak Poetry jammers. I include it here because I found it linked from Heather’s blog.
• Sarah Salter’s blog post “For Girls Only: Naked.” In this post, Sarah combines poetry, prose – and pain. And it’s not for girls only.

Then I found two short stories, or actually, one short story and one five-part short-short story.
• “The Herd” by Bart Schaneman. Bart is a young writer originally from Nebraska. At his blog, Rain Follows the Plow, he writes short stories about his home state.
• “Mama Kept Staring,” by my friend Jim Schmotzer, posted at this blog, The Faithful Skeptic. For five days, Jim posted successive parts of his short story (so up need to “read up” from the first post on Feb 28).

And then the prose. There is so much good prose being written that this short list won’t do it justice. Some of it is serious; some is funny; all of it is good.
• “An Invitation to Hell,” by Billy Coffey, one of the best storytellers writing on the web. He has a novel called Snow Day being published later this year. This blog post is about writing, which lately he’s been writing about on Fridays. Writing about writing, that is.
• “Being Unintentionally Hilarious,” a blog post by Kathy Richards at Hey Look, A Chicken! Kathy is known as Katdish on Twitter, and if don’t follow her, you better. She rules. She also rocks.
• Two by author Athol Dickson. I’m a fan of Dickson’s. I love his novels, and in fact just finished River Rising this past week. He wrote a guest article for Novel Journey entitled "Forgotten Beauty," and it is good. On his blog, he posted “The American church is dying, and to save it we must join it.” And it is good, too.
• “They Are Listening,” a blog post by Erin at Together for Good. Erin is also one of our TweetSpeak Poetry jammers. All I can say is, she has an oldest son who sounds a lot like my oldest son, 24 years ago.
• “I Am Canadian,” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy. OK, so the Canadian hockey team won the Olympic gold medal. I mean, it’s just a medal, right? It’s just a game. We’ll get over it. Maybe. In the meantime you can read one Canadian’s soul-stirring tribute to her country, and (if you're an American) you won't feel so bad about who lost.