New Look, New Updates, New Projects--Same Mission

It's been awhile since I have posted, but I am finally back! It was a hard year for me, with multiple illnesses and deaths in my immediate family and among close friends, so I needed to take some time to reflect and focus on myself, but now I am ready to start writing. As you can see, I have changed the design of my blog and plan to start fresh. I plan to post more regularly, offering environmental and political commentary, as well as personal and professional reflections. There is now an option to subscribe to my blog by e-mail and I will be sending out a newsletter to those who are interested.

On writing the front, I have been very busy with my freelancing and teaching writing workshops for kids and teens. I am currently a contributing editor on a text book on sustainability for a 10th grade curriculum. Earlier this summer, I had an article published in Earth Island Journal about wolves in Yellowstone. Also around that same time, the Union of Concerned Scientists finally launched their Climate Hot Map, which featured several articles I authored on the effects of climate change in specific geographical regions (specifically, I wrote the articles for Alaska, Canada and Siberia) as well as a dozen or so of which I completed revisions/rewrites. The map is a useful tool for helping people understand how climate change is really affecting us in certain parts of the world, and how it will continue to affect us in the future based on how much fossil fuels we still use. It puts a human face on the issue.

Just this week, I was the featured reader at a popular poetry series in Cambridge. Not only was it a great evening, but I sold about a half-dozen chapbooks and made a decent profit in donations. I also had some poems featured in the wonderful new online literary journal, Amethyst Arsenic, which was founded by a friend. I also have a poem about my grandmother forthcoming in the summer issue of the Naugatuck River Review, which is due out in the next week or so.

On the activist front, I just launched a new blog called Straw-Free Somerville, for which I intend to post actions and updates of/on my latest efforts to urge restaurants and grocers in Somerville and the surrounding areas to phase out/drastically reduce their use of plastic drinking straws and other single-use plastic items. Check it out at: www.straw-free-somerville.blogspot.com! Suggestions for actions welcome!

More to come soon!