Three More

This is the title page of OYL 2, a short story entitled Cause. Its unofficial and much more entertaining title given by my friend Stephen Carter is Mormon Snake Volcano! I have a lot of affection for this particular book because it's the first short story I've started and finished since I was 14 or something. It's definitely lacking in some serious ways but just finishing it was pretty nice.

As the unofficial title suggests, the story involves snakes so the cover stock is a bumpy, handmade paper that looks like scales. I knew I was on the right track when Avery, my four year old, saw it and asked, "Did you kill a snake to make that book?"

The letter "A" singled out on the title page was meant to echo Hawthorne's scarlet letter.


David West and Jim Irons were colleagues of mine back at the College of Southern Idaho and fellow poets. We decided to collaborate on a book just for a kick and ended up having a good time with it. Actually, the reading and publication party were fun -- the actual production process was like being waterboarded by Karl Rove himself. Fortunately, as ever, my mother came to the resucue and helped me put them together. The book is an accordion-fold (a.k.a concertina) with three individual chapbooks sewn into the valleys. The label you see is actually a removable paper band.

Below is Thousand Springs, my first major post-MFA writing project. During my thesis defense, one of my committee members asked, "So what's next for you?" I said, "A book of nature-love poems called 'Thousand Springs.'" I knew the question was coming because every MFA at BSU got asked that so I wanted to have something specific in mind. Suzanne, the girls, and I had just been on a trip to the Thousand Springs area in southern Idaho and were in love with it. I came up with this half-baked idea to write a series of poems about the place and that was the basis for my not-very-sincere answer at my defense. Later, once I got a real job and had some time to think about it, I decided to make good on my sort of silly promise. The poems aren't actually about Thousand Springs but that is the title poem and there's a lot of water/rain/snow imagery.