“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
-Leonard Bernstein

Of all the commodities in the world, perhaps none is more precious and scarce as time. It slips quietly past, often ignored or even resented when it moves too slowly during times we’d like to be in the past. But for every single person to ever walk this earth, time is finite, and suddenly one day it is gone. We become acutely aware of the fleeting nature of time when we feel we do not have enough of it. And yet this often yields the best work. The knowledge that our time is short, whether in the grand scheme or simply in the moment, pushes us forward and challenges us to think in ways we might not if we were to believe that our timeline was infinite.

Traci Brimhall spoke to us from Kansas in mid-August where the weather was warm though the Delta surge was making its way to the area from Missouri. Brimhall is a poet with multiple books to her name. Her most recent, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod came out just as the pandemic began which meant cancelled book tours and staying home reading poetry to herself rather than to others. The work in this new book stretches far into the past, some of it from the time when she was pregnant with her son who is now eight years old. The pandemic dampened the celebratory feeling of the book launch at first, but now that our culture has adapted to a new way of connecting, Brimhall feels that the option of an online platform has actually opened the world in interesting ways. To hear more, including live readings by the poet, listen to the complete interview.

Bishakh Som spoke to us from Brooklyn. She reported that her neighborhood was returning to some semblance of normal with people going out to eat and drink. Som was in Manhattan when we spoke, preparing to teach an in-person class, a new world for her in many ways. An author and artist, Som has published two graphic works (more information below in the reading section of this newsletter). She is now at work on a third book having spent much of 2020 wanting to do so but finding she was not in the right frame of mind. Instead, she worked on a series of small paintings through 2020, now turning her attention to this new, long-form book project. To hear more about her work, both written and visual, listen to the complete interview.