Collision

Off the coast
gentle giants lurk,
feeding, singing
breaching for air.

Leviathan corpses
float belly up,
sharks gnawing at scraped flesh.
Cetacean carcasses
roll in the surf,
gulls pecking at putrid blubber.

Necropsies reveal
fifteen-foot contusions,
crushed spines and smashed craniums,
twelve-inch fragments chipped from ribs.

Manmade vessels
parting water at forty knots
barely slow when they
collide with
beasts so great
the earth can’t hold them.

Buried on the beach or
towed out to sea,
rancid remains refuse to
disappear. Tail flukes
poke out of the sand,
carrion washes back up onshore.


This fall, three blue whales beached or were found floating at sea off the coast of Southern California in a span of two weeks. Each appeared to have been hit by a ship. At first scientists wondered whether the massive creatures had become disoriented and investigated the possibility of domoic acid poisoning. The bacterial product is found in algae blooms and can virtually paralyze marine animals, including 21 whales and dolphins this summer. No evidence of a neurotoxin was found, however.

There were many striking images from these incidents, including a veterinarian who hoisted herself up onto a corpse by using knives like climbing pitons, but I was particularly moved by the carcass that was towed out to sea but kept resurfacing on beaches as it made its way down the coastline. Seaside residents didn’t want to see the putrefying mess or certainly smell it, but the rotting cadaver wouldn’t let us look away.

Day one in the blogosphere

I am a writer, and I am immensely privileged to make a living at it.

For the past nine years, I have worked at Boxoffice Magazine, a trade publication for the movie theater industry. I’ve held many positions there, first as the film and technology editor, later as the editor. Now I’m a part-time editor-at-large. My two major beats are movie reviews and exhibition-related technologies, such as digital cinema. But you won’t be reading any of that material here. You can find it easily enough at boxoffice.com.

Since January 2005 I have been pursuing my graduate degree at the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. There I focus on fiction, studying with John Rechy, Janet Fitch, Gina Nahai and Judith Freeman, but also have taken nonfiction with the L.A. Times’ Kenneth Turan, playwriting with Donald Freed and poetry with Holly Prado Northup. I’m on track to turn in my thesis, a novel, at this time next year.

I also serve as editor-in-chief of Southern California Anthology, a student-run literary journal published by MPW. Our first issue will be available in the coming months. And this fall I joined the Writing Center at USC as a consultant, working with students one-and-one and in group workshops.

As a result of all this writing and editing and consulting—at which, again, I am extremely privileged to make a living—I have found that my own writing, including work on my novel, has suffered. It’s not often that I compose anything that’s not for a deadline. Regrettably, I have found myself hesitating to take the time to write, say, a poem that won’t be handed in.

And so today, which happens to be my birthday, I am launching a blog. With a debt of gratitude to Holiday Reinhorn, who encouraged me to write 10 minutes a day (it’s only 10 minutes!), and Holly Prado Northup, who introduced me to the concept, here is my online writer’s notebook.

Here I will work on material that’s not for work, that’s not for school, that’s not even necessarily for my novel. It might be poems, in which I’ve discovered an amateur interest, or other snatches of literary writing, fiction and non-. It might be a response to something I’ve read or seen or heard. It might be a current event filtered through a critical or literary prism. It might be a recording of my interactions with the world.

Whatever it is, it will, just by virtue of the fact that this blog exists, make writing—that is, my writing—a priority. I will have to hand something, anything, in, even on an arbitrary deadline. It may not be polished, but it will be considered.

Call it a structured journal. Deliberate contemplation. Purposeful escape. Habit.