Often compared to soundtrack music for films that have never been made, The Plaster Cramp is a cross-genre collaboration I’ve been engaged in for several years with member’s of The b.l.a.c.k. Lodge Brass Band. I typically describe what we do as some form of chamber jazz, but we’re just as much influenced by math rock, folk traditions, and the history of electronic music (from Stockhausen to Regan Farquhar). Which ultimately makes us a pretty strange band. Yet of all the musical projects I’ve attempted throughout my life, this is the first one that strangers seem to actually enjoying listening to. This strikes me as a particular metric for success.

Which is why we’ve decided to attempt an experiment and release our eighth record, Soma, as a limited-edition vinyl LP (our previous recordings were digital-only releases). Alternating between spacious meditations and percussive expeditions, the eleven songs of Soma operate as a non-verbal internal dialogue, improvisations balanced by tight compositions and awash all over with environmental samples of wind and water and laughter. Dean Thornton is currently assembling the artwork, and we’re working with Little Elephant Custom Vinyl, one of the best small-batch record makers in the country. We hope to have records in folks’ hands by October 27th, 2023. In order for that to happen, though, we need to collect pre-orders now.

If this sounds like a fun or enticing prospect, click here to pre-order a copy of Soma by the Plaster Cramp for $40 USD (postage included for US orders). You can also purchase the record through our Bandcamp page (this is especially useful for international orders), or pre-save the songs on the streaming service of your choice (they’ll be added to your library automatically on release day).

Pre-orders need to be made no later than August 22nd, 2023. There will likely not be a second pressing of the record after this date.

A little more info on the composition of Soma:

No poetry.

No abstractions.

I’m tired.

My bones hurt and my head is foggy and this associative chain of memories keeps cycling back to some of the folks who have meant the most to me throughout my life—Joshua, Glen, H., so many others—and to whom I can never speak again, touch again, laugh with or sleep beside again. They are gone, some more mysteriously than others. But I’m still here.

From the very start, death’s sorrowful hand has defined my life (my mother was convinced I was the reincarnation of my brother Daniel: try growing up “normal” with that as the opening lines to your tragic backstory). The way I listen, the stiffness in my gait, how I respond to the sight of something light adrift on a morning thermal: everything about me is somehow informed by loss, and it’s exhausting. I’m tired of the loving part of me being so constantly, irreversibly bound to death. Tired of and tired by. Like a leafless vine fed on sour milk, reaching for something high above, something close to where the light shines through: my roots will never not be sown through the fertile soil, black with worm castings and moldering leaves.

So much for no poetry. Too tired to stick to my own arbitrary rules. Glen would playfully mock me for this. H. wouldn’t give a shit either way. I don’t know how Josh would react because he died when we were still both so young, barely in school: all I really remember is his laughter and his curling locks and how one time we were racing through his grandparents’ kitchen and somehow knocked over an extension ladder (why was there a ladder in the kitchen?), how it came down hard and fast on my bare foot and blackened my big toenail which, in a few days, would terrifyingly fall off. Who else alive knows this story? I’m too tired to answer my own questions.

Somehow, this all equals eleven songs etched in black lacquer. Songs written through the cipher of my worn-down corpus. Songs capturing the listless fatigue stitched through the endless prayer of remembering. Songs embodying an exuberance I wish I could hold and make real. Songs of incidental beauty when I remember not everyone I love is dead. Songs I can write yet only others can perform.

The personnel for Soma are Dead Charlie (reeds, bass recorder, arrangement, contrabass, percussion), Pella (piano, vibraphone, keyboards, arrangement, viola, horns), Ants (horns), Kes (percussion, marimba, kalimba, horns), T (cello, percussion, alto trumpet), and Lawrence (drums, percussion, horns, broken air organ), with me providing composition, arrangement, production, electronics, and keyboards. Field recordings provided by Scott Sell, as well as klankbeeld and Benboncan at freesound.org. All artwork done in collaboration with Dean C. Thornton, who also was indispensable in making all these varied pieces come together as a whole.

As always, thank you so much for reading and for listening. None of these things would be possible without you.

In the usual tidal-bore cycle that dominates my public life as an artist, nearly all of the stories that I published in 2022 were released over just a few weeks in November and December. A few more pieces might actually get published before year’s ends, but now seemed a good time to share the news with interested parties. Which leads us now to this pithy list:

• “Cake of the Earth” in Canada’s Hermine, a wonderful journal who just last year published my escape-fantasy “Pop & Freedom.” Told in the voice of one of my favorite recurring characters, “Cake of the Earth”—the first of my pandemic-era writings to be featured in a literary journal—is about as close to a teenage love story as I’ve likely written yet.
• “Robinia” in Ireland’s Channel, a publication focused on nature’s complex relationship with humans. Also a repeat venue for me (they published last year’s “Growth Unencumbered”), the people at Channel have shown me a lot of love and been such great editorial collaborators. This, too, is a pandemic-era story, one wherein I get to exercise a little bit of my own personal fantasizing, about something I should have done but couldn’t do for my mother many years ago.
• “Of Age(Caprice)” in Honk Kong’s The Bureau Dispatch. This is a new journal for me, but I really enjoyed working with them to bring this story (and its accompanying dossier) to print. If you can believe it, this one’s actually a Christmas story.

Hermine and Channel are both print journals, so you’ll have to purchase copies in order to read the stories. The Bureau Dispatch, though, is online and free.

In related news, my post-jazz chamber group The Plaster Cramp has a new record out called Wax-Eater. While the album has been available as a digital download from Bandcamp for a couple weeks now, today marks its streaming release on pretty near any platform you can think of (including Spotify, AppleMusic, iTunes, YouTube, and many more). It was a difficult year for me to compose new music—indeed, a difficult year to compose much of anything aside from improvised songs sung at my animal cohabitants, who did not appreciate my efforts one bit—so this record feels especially important to me. I hope you find its range of sounds and textures intriguing.

And that’s it! As always, thank you for reading, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. None of what I do would mean anything without you.

—Douglas W. Milliken

by guest contributor Patrick Kiley

[For this third episode in the ongoing review/response sequence composed by collaborators and friends, Patrick Kiley takes the time to swim through the emotional and environmental nuances of “Growth Unencumbered,” a short story I wrote while a guest of writer Carl Skoggard and artist Joseph Holtzman at their country home in Valatie, New York. For two weeks in November 2019, I stayed in a refurbished farmhouse on the edge of their property, spending most mornings in the expansive studio addition working on new drafts while periodically looking out the east windows to observe, as the dark slowly eased into dawn, the crepuscular activities of a family of cranky ducks who claimed the nearby pond as their home. (In actual fact, I would never have met Carl and Joe if not for Patrick, who—through his press PS Hudson/Pilot Editions—has published several books by both Carl and me: in a sense, “Growth Unencumbered” very much owes its existence to the ever-reaching connective tissue expanding outward from the kinda-gross-but-ultimately-loving heart of Patrick Kiley.) It was an incredibly important two weeks for me, as an artist and as a human. Partly inspired by S. B. Walker’s Walden series of documentary photographs, “Growth Unencumbered”—originally printed in Issue 4 of the Irish journal The Channel in the spring of 2021—is the first published piece from the body of work I composed while in Valatie. Without the confluence of all these things—the house, the landscape, the photographs, the friendships—I never would have written this story. There’d have been no story to write. — DWM]

Two people go on a walk in some woods to a place that’s special to them. Previously, one of them suffered a wound to his arm which necessitated amputation. Negligence played a role in this accident and left room for shame to creep in. The amputee loves the woman he’s walking with. At the very least, it seems like today things will be okay. But a small, dark revelation bubbles up from the calm of the hampered narrator’s wincing self-reflection. It’s a moment of brutal honesty that, depending on the reader, may provoke a sense of justified revulsion or an irresistible pang of empathy. This is one possible reading of “Growth Unencumbered.”

Reading a story by Douglas W. Milliken is itself like taking a walk—along a shaky ledge above a beautiful coastline. For one thing, you’re often outside in his fiction, and the environment is always sharply drawn. But it’s no postcard. There’s a sense of menace just underfoot. The ground could—and will—give at any moment, but you need to keep walking if you want to see something you haven’t seen before. This is just to say, you never really “settle in” to one of Milliken’s stories—you only ride its edge.

Milliken’s signatures are all over “Growth Unencumbered” almost like olfactory traces: a skunk’s thiol sprayed across a cold boulder last night with a blush of spring violets blown over it this morning. Let me try to bring that home. Mildly rueful self-effacing wisdom and bare honesty that’s so vulnerable it’s almost funny: “I always knew I’d live long enough to see my body fall apart, but still, I never thought I’d see the parts actually shed like leaves from an autumn tree.”

Bitter as almond skin, but who wouldn’t want a nibble?

I’ll admit it: I’m a friend of Doug’s. And when I read his work, even a relatively-short short story like “Growth Unencumbered,” the language in my mind starts sounding like the words on his page. Raw sense saturates common sense. A little sympathetic nimbus grows up and out of my atlas. Every writer casts some kind of shadow with the way they write, and Doug’s sits with me like an alter ego even after I stop reading. This obscure figure starts to direct my attention to little things outside like dead wood and creeping vines, and to the inevitable little battles they’re suffering through in unseen pockets of spacetime. Mice who think they’re people, weeds that have accepted their lot. He also has me look up little known technical names for flora, for tools, for ailments, and for parts of anatomy that don’t stand out as much in their everyday idiom. Milliken’s language is always generous, mixing the profane with the precision-guided. So, for example, the names of human anatomy—humerus, condyle (“an articular prominence of a bone”) are rendered right alongside the imagined parlance of trees: “Wow! Yeah! I’m a tree! Woo-hoo!”. 

If I sit back and enjoy the company, I feel like I’m swimming through the story’s as-yet uncomposed penumbral postlude. 

Speaking of shadows, does the title itself send a little shiver down your spine, too? No one wants to hear about a growth. What’s this about an encumbrance undone? The words, for me, signal cancer, an uncontrollable proliferation. Milliken’s titles never give too much away and always leave a wide valence for interpretation. I think he wouldn’t be unhappy to know his words gave me pause. Why shouldn’t they?

Another signature of Milliken’s work is the revelation of the past in small details offered well into his stories, like stubbing your toe on a fossilized bone along the ledge you took to be uninhabited. Part way through “Growth Unencumbered,” after easing into the landscape where the story’s main action happens, we’re hit with a tiny declarative paragraph that pierces the veil of a pristine here and now: “That friend’s gone now. So’s his uncle’s house. So’s the magnificent Leonberger. Should anyone be surprised by that?” This is a small, startling crumble in the metaphorical ledge. As the reader proceeds from this moment, more infill from the past gradually pours into the present that we took to be an untouchable immanence, sufficient in itself, all there is. But it’s not. Every body has a phantom limb. As we accompany the characters along their trail we move transcendentally and sometimes painfully through the mystery of their lives, and ours.

Patrick Kiley is a publisher, writer, father, and make-believe-wooden-dead-guy perpetually haunting the capital region of New York’s Hudson River.

Thus spake Open Mike Eagle in his hurts-so-good anthem “Dark Comedy Late Show,” and man, what a fun line to say aloud and even better sentiment to feel. So while the finishing touches are being applied to the next installment of Friends Saying Nice Things About My Art, here’s a brief intermission to mention that my essay “Anyone Can Have a Good Time” is a finalist for a Maine Literary Award for short nonfiction. The story—an extended meditation on my evolving relationship with my mother before, during, and after her death—was published late last year in Shenandoah, where you can read it for free online along with an accompanying interview.

The Maine Literary Awards are held annually to recognize excellence in the Maine writing community and are conducted by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Winners will be announced during the award ceremony on May 24th at SPACE in Portland, Maine.

by guest contributor Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson

[For the second installment in this series of responses composed by collaborators and friends, Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson engages in an associative/expressionistic meditation on “Reuptake,” the opening track to Blind Pelican’s Let the Sun Take the Blame (as well as a corresponding namesake single), a song I wrote pre-pandemic about the dissonance emergent from missing people who I might never see again while simultaneously experiencing the low-grade animal bliss of sunlight warm against my body. (Perhaps fittingly, the choruses are sung by Ben Trickey, songwriting extraordinaire and ages-old friend who I have not seen in more years than I care to count.) Given that Genevieve is my long-time domestic- and creative-partner, it probably comes as no surprise that she had a hand in composing this song (in fact, one of Genevieve’s early vocal melodies from “Reuptake” was later reinterpreted by The Plaster Cramp as “Pella’s V. Occultation,” Genevieve being the eponymous V. cited in so many Plaster Cramp titles). It was an immense pleasure working with Genevieve on this/these song(s), and doubly so to observe and assist as she composed this response that is very much shaped by the iconography of our home, from the gardens we’ve planted to our nests on the sun porch to the nose-to-nose half-asleep silence that speaks stronger of affection than any known words. — DWM]

It’s too cold and too early to write this on the sun porch as I’d intended. So I found a sunbeam in our bedroom to curl up in, 12 feet above and 12 feet behind the corner of the house I think of when I hear “Reuptake.” But conditions are similar. The snowmelt off the roof keeps catching my eye. We got an inch or two of snow last night that likely won’t make it through the afternoon. The sun is getting stronger each day.

This week I’ll start seeds in the basement beneath the UV glow of a grow lamp and by the end of the month, I’ll bring them up to live on the sun porch, introduce their cotyledons to a second kind of light. These three walls of glass will heat the room up into the mid-80s on sunny days and in the evenings we hope it will hold in the upper-40s. I’ll put heat mats under the more tender starts to keep them from dropping below 60. 

I catch sight of the witch hazel through the melt-splashed panes of glass, scraggly neon yellow petals held by burgundy bracts on a twisting shrub that has been broken and taped back together how many times now? Until we planted it here. In the circle garden. At our home at the corner of Central and Nye. It reaches out no higher than two feet, a wide Y stretching where it can. This year it bloomed on February 4th. January 31st last year. January 26th before that. This harbinger of life seemingly out of synch with the rest of the garden. It pulled me out this year. Remember how I was searching for the first signs of a bud opening at the end of January? You would tell me it was coming. And we would check again in the mornings. When the first petal weaseled itself out of the barely separating bud, I called it. 

—“It bloomed!”

—“It’s blooming,” you reminded me. 

And the light got a little stronger each day. 

And after pruning in the orchard, we catnapped on the sun porch until the sun dipped behind Cindy’s house kitty-corner from our own, nuzzling into each other until it was too cold to bear then herding the cat back inside to close down the porch for the night. 

Even without my glasses on, I can see the girdles and thick bark-scars on the witch hazel from its previous lives on Brackett Street and at the Black Lodge. And I can see, too, a haze of color against the snow punctuated by the rhythm of melt past the window. Electric yellow unfolding from burgundy. A snippet of glorious life in mud season.

Genevieve Victoria Casale Johnson weaves together education and agroecology with art and design. She curates multi-genre events, leads intergenerational play programs, and creates meals that evoke deep conversations. Sometimes she stitches tiny pants for tiny people. Sometimes she makes infinitesimal donuts with friends. And sometimes she tends a subterranean garden with her house spouse.

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You can find more music by Blind Pelican on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and most anywhere else you enjoy streaming and downloading independent music.

by guest contributor Anne Buckwalter

[Expository note: given that writing fiction has become, for me, a truly alarming struggle during these pandemic years, the act of writing promotional/acknowledgement material for my recent publications (and other creative endeavors) has become well-nigh impossible. To counter this (with any luck temporary) linguistic enervation, I have enlisted the aid of some of my most beloved and talented friends to act as my hype-people while I rekindle my spirit and relearn how to write. The first installment in this series is provided by the artist and writer Anne Buckwalter, a dear friend, a generous spirit, and an absolute genius in the realm of subtle detail. Her paintings catch my breath and her stories stop my heart. I am so honored for her words, words I now get to share with you without any further preamble.— DWM]

I grew up in a family of woodcarvers. My dad carves uncannily realistic ducks and birds, and his dad was a master decoy carver and cuckoo-clock repairman. I didn’t inherit their talents — I can barely put together a basic shelf, let alone a convincing avocet — but I like the idea of bending a hard, unforgivable material into something supple and suffused with life. Such is the feat of Douglas W. Milliken’s small and spirited wooden carvings, referred to by the artist as dendroforms.

I had to google this word. The prefix dendro means tree-like, meaning the wooden objects are effectively self-referential, though they bear no resemblance to the form of an archetypical tree. Instead, they take on anima-imbued shapes that are not quite animal in the anthropomorphic sense, but nevertheless seem to have the capacity for life. The forms communicate a history of long existence, as if they are remnants or talismans from another time. Perhaps this is because they arrived to my apartment in Philadelphia carefully packed with descriptive cards explaining the material (all of the wood was sourced from local areas near Milliken’s home in Maine), the stain (all natural dyes, such as red wine, aronia berries, or black tea), and the finish (beeswax, linseed oil, etc) and a small drawing of each one— silhouettes ranging from long and sinewy (the Adrian Brody of the group, as I referred to it) to short and stocky (the George Costanza).

Trying to match each form to its correlating description felt like an exercise in species classification, and I wondered as I matched how critical this task was to interpreting the objects from an aesthetic perspective.

Very critical, I believe. As any other hopeless weirdo who also attended six-plus years of art school can attest, the context in which a work is experienced is as important as the work itself. Rather than seeing these objects on a shelf or in a vitrine in a white-cube gallery, they were delivered to my home where I could touch them, read about their origins, delight in their idiosyncrasies, experience their symbolic and literal weight (the former much heavier and the latter much lighter than I had anticipated). I moved them around my kitchen table like the pieces to a haunted prehistoric board game, I caressed them like the worry-stones I used to carry around as a kid, I played with them like toys, smelled them, I attributed them personalities (The Professor, The Athlete, The Drag Queen) and chose favorites. Within an hour of them being in my possession, they had become strangely intertwined with my own history, my own lost childhood.

Whether or not this intimate exchange was all part of Milliken’s intent is unknown, and arguably irrelevant. This is why the digestion of art is a dialogue rather than a monologue: what the artist means for one to get out of the work must be simultaneously considered as a vital component and disregarded altogether. However, having both read Milliken’s stories and heard his music, the dendroforms seem to me to be spiritual siblings to his other creative endeavors, and all three are inextricably connected by a unifying, weathered thread: the coexistence of roughness and smoothness, an unpredictable sharp edge or twisted knot on an otherwise soft plain. This effortless contradiction, to me, is an ultimate strength of all of Milliken’s work, and his wooden forms are no exception. Though I might find myself endeared to their physical qualities, they are much more than that — not simply charming playthings, but hard proof of life, personal relics, not trying to exist as anything but what they are.

Though disparate in appearance and utility, it is easy to love Milliken’s carvings with the same tenderness I love my dad’s shorebird carvings. I have a shelf of my dad’s birds in my kitchen, and I set one of the butterfly pea flower tea-stained dendroforms between a least sandpiper and a mallard. Where the bird carvings play their tricks on me, wanting me to believe that tiny hearts beat inside their breasts and they could at any point fly away, the small, smooth lump of wood between them pulled no punches, told no lies. The opposite of a decoy. Not alluding to life, per se, but still full of it.

Anne Buckwalter is a painter and writer currently based in Philadelphia. Her creative practice explores female identity and the coexistence of contradictory elements. Inspired by the folk art traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, her work arranges disparate objects in mysterious rooms and ambiguous spaces. By imagining obscure narratives that embrace paradoxes, her paintings delve into questions about the female body, intimacy, and gender roles. You can find her work at www.annebuckwalter.com.

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To see more examples of dendroforms, as well as other occasional documentation of my life in art, consider following my Instagram @douglaswmilliken. You can also direct queries there, or through the Contact form on this page.

I’m going to open with an obvious statement with which we can all relate: this year did not go as anticipated. So after 52 weeks of the absurd, the painful, and the unforeseen during which time I neglected to respond to any email on time, wasted entire shell-shocked days in isolation listening only to pre-recorded rain storms, and completely abandoned maintaining any pretense of a public social-media presence, it seems only fair that I break my 38-year no-year-end-wrap-ups streak with an absurd, painful, and unforeseen year-end-wrap-up.

The Stories in the World.

In addition to not writing nearly as much as I normally would (and far less than I wanted to), I also published far less (though, oddly, more than I published in 2019). The stories that did make it into print, however, are some of my favorites: a short essay about my mother, “A Fox in Tall Grass,” in the El Chapo Review; a quiet recovery narrative, “Saline,” in Reflex; a diary of domesticity and solitude, “Sister of Dog Fear (Wash & Sleep Journal, ’72-’74)” in the Arkansas International; a testimony of adolescent delinquency, “Thomas,” read on-air by Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum on his program Poems from Here; a meditation on a painting while waiting outside a theater, “Waiting for Tampopo,” in Deep Water; a story of interdependence with an unlikely cohabitant, “Sulfur,” in the London Reader; and a fellowship discovered among survivors of abuse, “Wet Nap & Sensualist,” in Sporklet. Some of these stories have been looking for homes for more than six years. Some were mere months old. I’m psyched that they’ve found they way out into the world, and that most of them can be read for free.

This year also saw the republication of my first book, White Horses, in a special tenth-anniversary edition featuring new artwork and a reflective preface. This marks not only a new life for something that has long been out of print, but also a personal turning point: in making this reprint of White Horses—a book I have harbored many mixed-feelings for since before its original publication—I finally realized that it doesn’t do me any good to reflexively degrade my past self for having been less experienced than my current self (who in turn will soon be damned anyway to being a past self and thus ignorant to what future me knows). Not only does it harm me, it harms the people who loved me then and supported me in my work (if someone tells me they were really moved by something in White Horses and I respond by calling it an amateurish flop, doesn’t that send the message that this person’s taste is likewise unrefined, that they are wrong in their affection for the thing?). Whatever flaws that book (or any of my books, or any of my records, or any of my other artistic forays) may have, it was created from a place of sincerity, embodying a legitimate urge to share the experience—either figuratively or literally—of what it feels like for this unique human to exist. In a year so permeated by such stultifying, paralyzing weight, it was good to recognize that I can (and should) cut myself some slack now and then. White Horses isn’t perfect. None of my stories are perfect. But I love them. I put as much of myself into each of them that I could. If I can’t love them, then what the hell about myself can I love?

Also (not my stories but someone else’s), my digital print “Solo” became the cover image for my dear friend Suzanne Langlois’s debut collection of poems, Bright Glint Gone.

In a different sort of literary accessibility, during the first two months of the pandemic I produced eight episodes of Quarantine Story Time, a live reading series where I shared my own stories alongside the work of Megan Grumbling, Brad Liening, and Meghan Lamb, among others. It was a joy and challenge to produce these shows, and with any luck, I’ll get my shit together and make a few more in the coming year.

The Stories Not Quite So in the World.

There were two literary projects this year that definitely happened but you will be hard pressed to find evidence of. The first was the immersive site-specific performance/installation/thing [STORAGE], whose run was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-written with Christina W. Richardson and Marissa Sophia Schneider and produced/created/orchestrated by the Bare Portland theater collective, [STORAGE] inhabited a wing of a former Catholic girls’ school, bringing together the anxieties of identity, sexuality, and personal history with towers of garbage, pizza-box diatribes, and the longing for the absolute best pair of short-shorts. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience seeing [STORAGE] morph from a chaos of someone else’s belongings into a dizzying circus of vulnerability, and such a massive heartbreak to see it end halfway through its run. I hope that someday it can have another life. I hope that some of you actually got to see it performed.

A different version of the ephemeral was my short-run publication June of 2020: a quarantine journal. Written as a series of formally-identical declarative sentences, June of 2020 was the physical aspect of a fundraising effort to support Black Girl in Maine, founded by writer, educator, and activist Shay Stewart-Bouley whose talent lies in taking the complex abstractions of social justice and explaining them in a way that is not only immediate and concrete, but also grounded in the experiences of both herself and her audience (in other words, she takes the cultural phenomenon at large and makes it directly relevant to you and your life). The project raised close to $700 for Black Girl in Maine, with ten paperback editions and twenty-two hardbound copies being produced for individuals across the US. While these thirty-two books are the sum total of copies ever to be made, the Portland Public Library and Herrick Memorial Library both have copies that, sometime in the new year, should be part of their permanent collections. June of 2020 can also be read electronically through the PPL’s Isolating Together.

The Songs in the World.

While composing new stories might have been a near-impossible task, I found that working on music—be it constructing new compositions, fleshing out other people’s songs, or fine-tuning existing recordings—was something I could focus on for hours and days at a time without feeling the crushing burden of the external world. While there are several projects still in the works with various collaborators, several others are easily found and, if not enjoyed, at least heard.

Early in our COVID lockdowns, long-time friend and collaborator Scott Sell and I began working out alternate versions of songs we had been playing on tour together these past few years. The idea was to introduce the pieces to new territories, new moods and sonic environments. In this effort, I believe we were successful. While Endless Tall Boys welds brooding jazz with the emptiest roadhouse barroom, Midwest Mess ranges from post-nap pastoralia to 90s alternative guitar rock. With any luck, more of these digital cassingles will be in Scott’s and my future.

Operating in a more ambient vein, I began writing new work (some as tight compositions, others as loose sketches designed for copious improvisation) for my long-distance chamber group The Plaster Cramp. With a quartet of EPs—Four Roads::Losing Drafts, Perpetual Aftermath, Ganymede, and Dao Yurenat—we synthesized the widow’s-walk dirge with the breathless drones of Colin Stetson, the dizzying spatial labyrinths of early Joan of Arc with the burgeoning senility of an old hound dog.  After decades of writing obtuse art-rock and hammering post-metal, these are likely the most accessible tunes I’ve ever written. I feel no shame in this.

On a more production-oriented note, I also helped in the final mastering of Dean Thornton’s We’re Glad You’re Here, a gorgeous and confounding guitar-rock record exploring longing and loss and the thin line where one dissolves into the abounding landscape (exactly my kind of jam). Dean and I have known each other for nearly twenty years and have collaborated on too many projects to enumerate here, yet it was still a fresh and exhilarating experience helping to usher these songs into their proper sonic space. (I also mastered a related project by The Gentle Gang, a record called Rifle Fire, Darker Land that maybe only a dozen people will ever hear.)

Oh, and I started playing clarinet. That’s not something you’ll likely want to hear just yet, though.

Otherwise…

This was a year defined by deep anxiety and hours of staring out windows at birds enacted dramas in my garden. A year defined by digging holes and cataloging flowers, singing at the cat and wishing my partner were home. A year defined by the depression from without at battle with the depression from within. A year defined by online D&D battles and drinking whiskey with neighbors from a safe and cautious remove. A year defined by grass and leaves and the scent of rotting apples and the scent of my partner’s hair. A year defined by patience.

Thank you for reading.

In my perennial laissez-faire approach to self-promotion and website maintenance, several noteworthy publications have come and gone this wretched year without my personal publicist and marketing team (i.e.: me) remarking much upon them. So to make up for said slacking, here is a pithy list of what stories, poems, essays, art, and music have been published where and how you can find them:

• “A Fox in Tall Grass,” a brief personal essay about my mother’s death, appeared in the January issue of El Chapo Review, which can be read for free online.
• “Saline,” a micro-fiction about domesticity and recovery, was long-listed for Reflex Fiction’s spring flash contest and can also be read free online.
• “Sister of Dog Fear (Wash & Sleep Journal, ’72-’74),” another sort of study of domesticity and solitude, appeared in the spring issue of the Arkansas International, which—in a magnanimous gesture resultant from the pandemic—was made available for free online (physical copies, however, can be ordered directly from the publisher).
• “Thomas,” a rare instance of my poetic voice, was read on Maine Public Radio by our state poet laureate, Stuart Kestenbaum, as part of his ongoing Poems from Here series (the text can also be read on Maine Public’s website).
• Still Point Art Gallery in Brunswick, Maine, featured three of my digital prints (“Mary,” “Strider,” and “Crickets”) in their summer (which, due to the pandemic, equals “online”) exhibition, Making a Mark, as well as one print (“Mary”) in their print journal, Still Point Arts Quarterly, available both online as a free PDF as well as a physical book purchased from the publisher.
• “Waiting for Tampopo,” an ekphrastic poem inspired by the triptych “Kylum” by Murray Hantman, appeared in Megan Grumbling’s weekly column Deep Water in the Portland Press Herald/Sunday Telegram.
• “Sulfur,” a flash fiction piece about living alone with a chicken, appeared in the summer issue of The London Reader, which can be downloaded for free or purchased directly from the publisher.
• Four Roads :: Losing Drafts, a new EP by my chamber group The Plaster Cramp, features translations of songs by Dean Thornton, Scott Sell, Ben Trickey, and Brandon Schmitt, all proceeds of which are being donated to the Grassroots Law Project.
• Scott Sell has released two digital cassingles—Endless Tall Boys and Midwest Mess (sales of the latter of which are also being donated to the Grassroots Law Project)—that feature various production and session-musician work by me, including my first ever recorded performances on the clarinet.

This all in addition to Bare Portland’s performances of [STORAGE], written collaboratively with Christina W. Richardson and Marissa Sophia Schneiderman, as well as eight episodes of Quarantine Story Time, the totality of which can be stream in reverse chronology here.

As always, thank you for reading, thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing with anyone you think might care, thank you for staying safe and staying aware in this terrifying time.