I got apples yesterday. Not just any apples, but ones from heirloom trees grown on a windy ridge in New Berlin. I got some Calville Blanc d’hiver, Seek-no-further, Black Gilliflower, Esopus Spitzenberg, and Hidden Rose, each one totally different in color, shape, smell, taste. These are mostly forgotten apples, many developed hundreds of years ago, […]

As my identity as a performance artist continues to evolve, I think a lot about why I do this work. Why do I feel compelled to get up in front of an audience and say strange things, and sing odd songs, and move how I do? What is the audience supposed to get out of […]

Last night, just before I turned off my computer, I caught an email from Pegi, a performance artist friend of mine. She’s curating a show in December and a few of the artists have had to drop out for various reasons. She was wondering if I could step in. The show is called “12/12/12” — […]

“Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” said legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. This weekend I attended a day-long intensive workshop that served as an introduction to Meisner’s strategies for developing the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances. We spent most of the day pairing off with various partners to observe […]

There are several Points of Exasperation that inevitably arrive in any extended discussion among a group of fiction writers, particularly a group of fiction writers arranged tensely around a formica table at a workshop or critique session. One PoE will come when someone broaches the unavoidable “show don’t tell” discussion. Someone will say, “I wish […]

I’ve come to realize in the past couple of years that “Editor” isn’t just my job, it’s my orientation. In my head, I’m constantly editing everything — utterances, advertisements, environments, text messages, events. I compulsively pick apart meals I’ve made and outfits I see in magazines, landscapes I pass and artwork I confront, always questioning […]

If you were a parent of young children in the 1990s, you probably sat through more than a few episodes of the “Magic School Bus” cartoon series. Scheduled for a convenient pre-nap time slot on PBS, my kids and I spent many hours watching the feisty and brilliant Ms. Frizzle take her elementary school class […]

I sang a solo in church yesterday. My friend Lesley asked me to sing to accompany the guest sermon she gave on the lives of immigrants in Milwaukee. I almost never sing alone in public anymore, but Lesley’s one of my favorite people and she picked “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” one of my […]

Tina and I just can’t stop going back outside. It’s summer in Wisconsin — with all its irresistible lakes and farms, parks and peaks — so I guess our unwillingness to stay indoors makes sense, but there’s more to it than that. Saturday we went back to Harrington Beach State Park with a friend, to […]

I had the privilege years ago of helping support a friend undergoing her vision quest, led by an Ojibway elder. At the start of the quest, which would include four days of fasting, my friend was presented with two bowls: One contained blueberries and one a piece of charcoal from the campfire. This was her […]