I have some wonderful friends. One of them loaned me her house last month, which overlooks the entrance of Tomales Bay. The town and the beach are both named Dillon Beach. If there is no fog, you can see across the bay to the Point Reyes National Seashore and then south to where the sun […]
There’s no wifi at my Aunt Mary’s beautiful old house, so we watch the tide come in and go out again twice a day. There’s a moment of stillness when it turns, the water clearly going under the bridge in one direction, and then a pause for maybe three or four minutes, and the surface […]
A long time ago (2001?), in a galaxy far, far away (southern Utah), I discovered a magical restaurant next to a stalwart lodge in a very small mountain town. “Discovered” is not the right word: my friend Julia took me there for a few days of hiking. She had come upon it the year before, […]
My sister Sarah has always been good at adventures. Both the larger-than-life experiences anyone would call adventures, and those ordinary quotidian events that she makes so much fun they turn into adventures. These photographs, (all taken by and copyright Sarah Fisk, 2016) are from a trip in the first category. Sarah and her sweetpea John […]
Over the course of my life I’ve envied several friends for their incredible sense of design. One of them is Jacquie, who lives in California’s Sierra foothills, overlooking the south fork of the Yuba River. Jacquie lives in a two-storey handmade house that she and her ex- built together decades ago. Constructed of wood and […]
I am not a farmer. I’m not even much of a gardener. My skills relate to hiring smart people and then agreeing with their ideas, which is how I come to have any sort of garden at all. But for the last few years, water has been in short supply in California. The combination of […]
I want to show you some clips from a talk I gave on creativity, but the constraints of this blog site prevent me from just putting the video here. However, if you click on the “continue reading” note at the end of the boxed paragraph, below, you’ll be taken to the right page — on […]
Every morning for the last several years I have jumped out of bed, raced into some clothes, and driven on automatic pilot over to my favorite café for breakfast. “Breakfast” = coffee, some sort of protein, and a whole wheat bagel or equivalent. “Coffee” = a latte. The food plan I follow asks me to […]
For about ten years I’ve been doing something fun with a few of my friends. It has the utilitarian name of “Craft Day.” Four or five of us get together, usually on a weekend afternoon, and do whatever hand-work types of chores have been piling up in our lives. We started out focused on repairs: […]
Not every line of every poem is going to be memorable, but once in a while a line sticks in your brain and stirs things around in there. Even, sometimes, one you wrote yourself. This is from “Daybreak,” the opening poem of my last collection: The More Difficult Beauty. Published by Hip Pocket Press, Gail […]