Poet Tina Kelley seems fascinated with words, unusual often obscure words. Have you met an aeolist (a person who claims to be inspired), or been blessed by one? Have you experienced a diapause (a period of suspended development? Have you discovered that you might, at least on occasion, be a prosopagnosic (one who suffers face blindness), or that you can practice steganography (a form of writing that obscures, like invisible ink)?
In Field Guide to Noth American Words, Kelley takes those unusual words and others and creates poems, poems that are not obscure or unusual, vivid poems about life, birthdays, aging, hacked passwords, birthdays, the future (as seen through birds), an old doll in an attic, all those rooms that the hallways of unusual words can lead you to. Like any proper field guide, the words are arranged alphabetically.
The Summer 2026 edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online today, and the theme is “renewing charity.” My new short story, “Decision on the Stairs,” is fiction, but it’s based on something that happened to my wife and I in London in 2012. We were getting ready for our day when fire alarms went off, and the hotel had to be evacuated. The elevators were not an option; we were on the 14thfloor, and the hotel was nearly full. There was no panic, but there was rising anxiety, and people were rushing to get out.
Six years ago, I published the last novel in the Dancing Priest series, Dancing Prince. A good deal of it is set on a fictitious island named Broughby in the Orkneys, off the northern coast of Scotland. One of the characters, Erica Larsson, becomes the romantic interest of Thomas Kent-Hughes, the reclusive son of King Michael who has gone his own way and avoided the royal limelight.
Thomas, or Tommy, leads an archaeological team that discovers what looks like a Viking tomb, except that it is carved with a cross, a very Christian cross. And Erica writes a story, of novella length, entitled “Island,” which imagines how such an anomaly could have happened. Vikings destroyed churches and abbeys; they didn’t get buried as Christians. Or did they?
I read a lot about the Vikings as research for Dancing Prince. If I’d included everything I learned, it would have made another book. But I did write the story that Erica would tell, and the publisher agreed to include it as an addendum with the novel. And I explained the story and how it came to be in a post entitled “The Story of the Novella ‘Island’”. Dancing Price, like it four predecessors, is classified as “alternative contemporary history.” Island is historical fiction, and it was the first time I attempted anything in the genre.
As it turns out, considerable information exists about the Viking Christians, or how the Vikings turned to Christianity. This past weekend, I stumbled across this short video, which describes what happened rather succinctly. It’s a fascinating story.
Top illustration: “Ansgar Preaches the Christian Doctrine in Sweden” by Hugo Hamilton (1830).
It’s one of those immediate political litmus tests. The White House Domestic Policy Council issued a report on the National Museum of American History, aka the American History Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Using the museum leadership’s own words and actions, the report said this: “Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” Predictably, the blue side of politics and the news media were outraged; the red side of politics said, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”You can read the report yourself and decide. It’s 112 pages, but the executive summary is succinct.
If you were asked to name the Founding Fathers, you would probably say George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. You’d think a minute, and add Benjamin Franklin and James Madison and perhaps John Hancock, he of the large signature on the Declaration of Independence. And there are others, of course. But another one, who didn’t sign the Declaration and wasn’t featured in stirring patriotic poems or songs, deserves better recognition for his more-than-significant contributions to the American cause. And his name was George Whitefield.
More than 30 years ago, media and education critic Neil Postman (1931-2003) warned against the proliferation of media technology, including the use of computers and related devices in classrooms. It took us more than 30 years to begin to learn he was right. I read sevral of his books, and I still have a copy of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Emily Wenneborg at Front Porch Republic just read another Postman work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), and she discovered the theme and ideas it contains have gone supernova.
I’ve read poems that are filled with tenderness. I’ve read poems that have an edge. But I can’t think of a collection I’ve read that have both tenderness and an edge.
That is, until I read Instructions for Use: Poems by Arlene Demaris. Not only does she write poems that are tender with understanding, she also drops any idea of rose-colored glasses and smacks you with often-shocking reality. And what you realize is that this is life, with the good and the bad mixing together into one lump of what it means to be human. Or as Demaris writes, we forget “how much of us is salt water, how much of us is music.”
