Dearest Ether--
Here are a few things I've been thinking about:

1. I can finally officially announce I'm the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award---hence the irresponsible trip to the UK.
2. Today begins my spring break, tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, and it will be nearly 80 degrees. What's going on around here? Where's that angsty March I always seem to be trudging through?
3. A little collection of poems from my manuscript "Genius of the Place" called The Folly Garden will be published as an e-chapbook by Gold Wake Press. I'm very proud of the work and I want you to read it, so check back for a link very soon.
4. The Sarah Palin movie Game Change was good! I loved hearing Emmylou's rendition of "The Great Divide" as a frustrated and exhausted Palin (desperately trying to learn the difference between the Iraq War and the War in Afganistan) arrives at John McCain's compound in Arizona.
5. HBO's show Luck was cancelled suddenly a few days ago because a third horse on the set had to be euthanized. There is something extraordinarily poignant about this news that puts me in mind of my childhood (or I should say my adolescence) spent primarily in barns, mucking stalls and picking gravel out of horses' hooves, dreaming that one of those noble animals would someday carry me away--out of a crummy home life--into some sort of abstract and teenaged vision of freedom. RIP Luck.