It was not an easy thing to turn my back on Christianity at nearly 60 years of age. Since my childhood, church had been the hub of social life for me. Prayer had started every meal, and Christian ritual had solemnized the sacred moments and transition points of life. …

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things …

A comment on one of my recent articles caught my attention. A young man expressed appreciation for my advice about letting friendship grow before deciding whether to explore a sexual connection.

The problem was, he said, sometimes women he went out with were ready for sex before he was.

Now…

I recently took another writer here to task for attacking modern poetry and everyone who writes it. Her disparagement was nothing to be taken seriously, just opinionated ignorance. But later, it occurred to me, her complaints about contemporary poetry sounded awfully familiar. In fact, they were the same tired old…

I’ve been a fan of Tessa Schlesinger for most of the time I’ve been on Medium, just over a year now. Everyone should read her essays. Tessa calls herself a global citizen, author, thinker, and polymath. …

Some of them were there because they thought it would be easy. Or that the stories that they wrote in fourth grade, or the poetry in high school, proved they knew already how to be creative.

Others signed up for CRWR 2310 because some advisor in the Athletic Department at…

A SONNET

Although the eggs we dropped were few and young
as mung bean sprouts, they cooked our dynasty
to scalding soup that lycheed from my tongue
its taste for dragon out the fantasy.

The appetizing spring rolled far away
to dim the sum of summer’s brief appeal.
Someone left moo shoe tracks on…

Getting followers on Medium should not be a problem for any good writer. It won’t even take that long — a few weeks, tops. It will require some effort, and some skill at writing. …