Essays, Lectures & Reviews
My Wife Gave Me Magic Mushrooms For My 60th Birthday (2025)
"While my intention had been simple ... the mushrooms had other plans."
Published in HuffPost
Ancestral Echoes: Exploring Aracelis Girmay’s An Experiment in Voices (2025)
“Nestled on the northern edge of Tanglewood’s Bernstein campus, the Linde Center for Music and Learning was designed to develop new modes and methods for presenting music and innovative programming.” Published in Berkshire Magazine
First Impressions of the Açores (2024)
“The author returns to his ancestral island of São Miguel for the first time and has some strong impressions about the landscape, along with questions about what is considered “native” flora and fauna on a volcanic island where all the species—including humans—came from somewhere else. He connects this to the sense of islander identity and comes to terms with the “fate” of not being able to completely know one’s history and origins.” Published in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies
Letter to America (2024)
“The psychedelic renaissance is not just about personal enlightenment or self-improvement—it is an invitation to dive into the depths of our shared human experience.”
Published in Terrain.org
Every Meal is a Story: A Peek Into Ruth Reichl’s World of Food (2024)
“On a sun-drenched June morning, Ruth Reichl welcomes me into her Spencertown, New York, home.” Published in Berkshire Magazine
Opinion: Massachusetts Voter Endorses Ballot Measure #4 (2024)
“As our nation grapples with an unprecedented mental health crisis, Massachusetts stands at the forefront of a potential revolution in treatment. Ballot Measure #4, which would legalize the possession and supervised use of natural psychedelics, offers a beacon of hope for countless individuals suffering from conditions like PTSD, depression, and anxiety.” Published in Lucid News
Opinion: A Massachusetts Voter Reflects on the Failure of Psychedelics Ballot Question 4 (2024)
Last month, Massachusetts voters decisively rejected Ballot Question 4, the Legalization and Regulation of Psychedelic Substances Initiative, with 56.9% voting against it and 43.1% in favor. As someone who supports the idea of exploring psychedelics for therapeutic purposes, I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Published in Lucid News
Getting Back to the Garden: Michael Pollan’s Long, Strange Trip (2024)
“Gardening is really the germ of all my work,” says Michael Pollan. Watching him expertly harvest garlic scapes in his garden in Litchfield County, you believe him.” Published in Berkshire Magazine
The Power of Listening: Forrest Gander’s Poetry of Memory & Place (2024)
“‘The basic gesture of my writing is a listening,’ Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander writes in an essay. ‘The great capacity of language is to bring us into proximity with one another.’” Published in Berkshire Magazine
Lenox Rising: A Berkshire Town’s Resilience and Renewal (2024)
“There’s a scene in Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday film classic It’s a Wonderful Life, where protagonist George Bailey, scion of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan Association, implores the other members of his community in the fictional Bedford Falls, New York, to get through a challenging time. Published in Berkshire Magazine
A Philosopher's Secret Garden: Mark C. Taylor and His Landscape of Ideas (2024)
“One of the first things you notice pulling up to Mark C. Taylor’s home is a large, rising stone that looks like a giant wave about to crest, thrust up from an ancient tectonic event known as the Taconic orogeny.” Published in Berkshire Magazine
Love and Patience on Mount Pico (2023)
“‘Are you sure this is a road?’ Samantha asked as the black basalt paving gave way to dark, red dirt, and the deep-green grass seemed to grow closer and closer to our rental car.
‘It’s supposed to be the fastest way,’ I answered. ‘According to Google Maps...’
Then I realized I’d lost the cell signal and my iPhone was navigating blind. We were trying to get to the guide house for an ascent up Mt. Pico on the eponymous island in the Azores.”
Published in The Write Launch
Through the Gates of My Ancestral Island (2023)
Approaching the Azores from the air seems unnatural, for descending upon them in such a way, a bird’s eye view, if you will, removes the sheer verticality of the islands as they thrust up out of the flat plane of the sea. Seen from above, the nine islands of this archipelago are also wildly out of scale; they seem smaller, confined as they are by the surrounding ocean waters; one loses the sense of power the islands convey when approached by sea. Upon the perspective of the slightly undulating level horizon of the ocean, with its ephemeral liquidity, you can see how everything on the island is, in contrast, solid and vertical, rising upwards, no, thrusting upwards, instilling a sense of its violent birth.
Published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature
WHITMAN AND THE SEA (2019)
The author reflects upon poet Walt Whitman's connection to the sea, his own ancestral connection to seafaring life, especially his great-grandfather's life as a whaler in 19th and early 20th century New England, and his ancestral connection to the Azores Islands in the North Atlantic. Published in Schuylkill Valley Journal Online
AT HOME IN THE WORLD: A Reading and Reflection on Dwelling, Nature, Phenomenology, and Ecopoetry (2021)
In this essay, adapted from a lecture he delivered to the Humanities Forum of Providence College in September 2021, the author talks about his book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, his engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger, phenomenology, ecopoetry, and, ultimately, the concept of home. Published in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies
A recording of this talk is available here: PC Humanities Forum
A REVIEW OF PEDRO DA SILVEIRA'S "POEMS IN ABSENTIA AND THE ISLAND OF THE WORLD" (2019)
A review of Poems in Absentia and The Island of the World, translated by George Monteiro (Tagus Press), published in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies.
JOHN FANTE, FRANCESCO DURANTE, AND LITERARY ISLANDS (2020)
The death of his friend, the Italian writer, Francesco Durante, causes the author to reflect upon their work together publishing John Fante's books in Italy, planning an aborted biography of the Italian-American novelist, and the relationship between literary islands, such as Capri and the Azores.
Published in Schuylkill Valley Journal
MY PESSOA: UNCOVERING "THE OTHERS IN ME" (2020)
Two translations of poems by Fernando Pessoa and three poems by the author, a poet and memoirist, and an essay on Pessoa explores clues to understanding the distinctly Portuguese form of identity creation as it is exhibited in Portuguese literature, as well as the immigrant/emigrant experience, finally understanding his own relationship to Azorean Portuguese identity.
Published in Pessoa Plural
THE NAUTILUS OF ROBERT LOWELL'S "SKUNK HOUR" (2018)
An essay on Robert Lowell's seminal poem and its origins in a Maine coastal town published in Schuylkill Valley Journal Online
LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN: GARY SNYDER AND SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT (2017)
An essay on Gary Snyder's "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout" published in Schuylkill Valley Journal Online
MAKING POEMS BETTER: THE PROCESS OF REVISION (1998/2018)
Essay version of a lecture on the process of revision in writing poetry, examining "Ox Cart Man," by Donald Hall and "Black Angus, Winter" by Scott Edward Anderson delivered by the author at the Writing Rendezvous Conference, University of Alaska, Anchorage, 26 April 1998. (Available on Academia.edu)
An updated, 20th anniversary edition of this lecture, delivered at the Boston Book Festival in 2018 is available on Academia.edu. Slides for this talk are also available on Academia.edu.
POETRY AS PRACTICE
How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction
A Craft Essay (2018)
In this lyrical essay on the writing life, Scott Edward Anderson shows how poetry can be more than a formal approach to writing, more than an activity of technique, but a way to approach the world, which is good for both the poet and the poem. (From Cleaver Magazine)
REVIEW OF IN THE PRESENCE OF THE SUN: STORIES AND POEMS, 1961-1991 BY N. SCOTT MOMADAY (1993)
A stylistic and thematic critical review first published in The Bloomsbury Review, July/August 1993. (Available on Academia.edu)
ELEGY & EXILE: ELIZABETH BISHOP'S POEM "Crusoe in England" (2011)
A critical examination of the poem "Crusoe in England" by Elizabeth Bishop, focusing on themes of exile, elegy, and Bishop's depiction of the title castaway character from the book "Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe. Themes of knowledge, memory, and feelings of displacement in the poem are discussed, as well as loneliness and bliss in the poem. First published in the Worcester Review, Elizabeth Bishop 100th Anniversary issue, March 2011. (Available on Academia.edu)
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: WRITING FROM THE SHADOWS (2016)
Sometimes poems speak from the darkest recesses of our minds and hearts. They reveal the shadow stories we tell ourselves and the deep-seated (seeded?) emotions that we hide from our conscious selves. (From Schuylkill Valley Journal Online)
Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility (2023)
“‘One can be born on an island in two ways,’ wrote the Angolan Azorean poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. ‘From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.’ Like Pinto, I’m feeling the ‘burning torch’ of connection to the islands of the Azores and find myself growing deeper and deeper entwined in the cords of my tangled roots there. And, it seems, the more I try to resist it, the tighter those cords bind me.”
Published in Barzakh Magazine
ELIZABETH BISHOP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE (1996)
An essay on Elizabeth Bishop, her poetry and collected letters, and several biographies and critical studies of the poet's life and work, first published in The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 1996. (Available on Academia.edu)
THE ART OF LOSING: LOVE LIVES OF ELIZABETH BISHOP (2016)
A review of two films about Elizabeth Bishop published in basalt.
Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley (2023)
On a chilly late-April morning, just a few days before Earth Day, Ben Nickley steadily makes his way uphill through a shrubby woodland at Jug End State Reservation. It’s early, when birds are most active, and the footpath is muddy from the spring rains. Nickley is on his way to set up mist nets. A bag slung over his shoulder holds tools and materials he will need when the birds begin to hit the nets; two members of his crew head down to the wetlands to set up more nets there. This is the second spring of bird banding that Nickley has launched as part of a biodiversity survey of the South Taconic Range by Green Berkshires.
Published in Berkshire Magazine