A few months ago I had the good fortune to hear Rachel Cohen reading from her recently republished A Chance Meeting. Rachel had been one of my professors for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. In taking the opportunity to greet her after the reading and she mentioned the first long-form essay published in Callaloo Literary Journal in 2007 — Lonesome Refugees.

Are there TV shows you watch for no apparent good reason? I have an inexplicable affection for home repair shows. The advent of streaming services brought Welcome Home, based in Waco TX, to my screen (until I realized how homophobic and scarily right wing the show’s owners are) and then a whole raft of HGTV based programming featuring builders and renovators in Chicago, Indianapolis, Southern California, Atlanta, Mississippi.

Today I am half-way through the second week of #PlasticFreeJuly sponsored by the Story of Stuff Project. I took a pledge:

I pledge to avoid single-use plastic, to reuse or recycle the plastic that I do use, to educate others about plastic waste, and to take Citizen Muscle actions to make plastic a thing of the past.