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If you've read my essays on walking, art, and writing over the past six months, thank you. This experiment in weekly public writing has flown by—I'm halfway through the year now.

Here's a recent essay, also about poetry --and about walking, blackberries, labor unions, and collective work as hope:

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/while-walking-91c ()

Earlier this summer I wrote about keeping a notebook and how that shapes my understanding of a writing life--and why I think it's so important, especially while we live in a product-oriented, ends-focused world where gadgets, gamification, and the next new thing promise to 'revolutionize' or 'disrupt' or make us 'productive'. What if that's not really what our creative lives need?

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/some-notes-on-notebooks

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In June I wrote about two of John #Constable's paintings--of his father's vegetable and flower gardens--that he made for his own house. It's an essay about grief and depiction and making art for oneself and with attention to what one loves:

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/while-washing-the-dishes-8f2

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I also wrote about how large language models are being talked about, and how I see them impinging on the human lives my students share with all living beings; about what I think the real stakes are in LLM use and encouraging it in the arts classroom. That's here:

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/no-the-computer-doesnt-think

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In late spring I wrote about what I call the precarity tax: all the extra time, energy, and money it costs for adjunct and other contingent college teachers to make university education possible. (75% of college teachers in the US are on a semester-to-semester or year-to-year contract and do not have stable employment, pension, or health insurance. Some receive no insurance through their employee. Some are on food stamps!)

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/the-precarity-tax

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I love #snails (#controversial #gardener's opinion) and wrote about what they teach me as a writer and thinker here:

https://bewilderment.substack.com/p/while-walking-101

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If you read any of these and enjoy, please consider sharing them or subscribing. I'm writing one essay each week for one year, and you can read them for free—there's not going to be a charge, there isn't a charge now—as an experiment in my writing practice. Knowing people are reading these and sometimes hearing from readers is very rewarding and I appreciate it so much.