Hey There! :: September 29, 2026

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again. ~ Georgia O’Keeffe

Here’s to all the naps taken, books read, and thoughts thought this summer. And a small whisper of acknowledgement for all the good tasks left undone. I was feeling bad about that, but the first cool whisper of fall reminded me that summer is my fallow season. As soon as we tipped over into autumn I felt myself snapping back to life.

I did plenty though. Graduated. Had a wedding. Weeded a garden that had been neglected since I started school. Turned off the internet at the house for a month and reset my brain (inspired by this). Watched chickens grow. Most importantly, I feel rested and ready to start my new program.

Last time I wrote, I mentioned I was going to start posting to Substack. I spent some time playing around with it this summer, but I found myself increasingly reluctant to set it up. I know it’s convenient, and people tell me they love the community, but honestly, it just feels like social media to me. After letting that go seven years ago, I can’t really bring myself to want to worry about feeds and likes and comments and re-shares and inventing content. I know it works for other people, but it doesn’t feel right for me at this time. So I’ll just keep posting here like a dinosaur. :)

After that no-internet-at-home month (caveat: it wasn’t actually no internet. We just agreed to quit using it and kept our phones completely bricked. When we needed to do something online we went to the library or coffee shop.) I have been thinking a lot about how we act like all this tech is inevitable, but really, we get to make our own choices around it. Yeah, I get that it’s all hyper-engineered to be addictive and it takes advantage of our evolution and yadda yadda potato chips, but we do still have a lot of choice about how we use this stuff. I need it for maps and parking and emergencies and school/work just like everyone else. But I don’t need it for binge watching, content on-demand (except for yoga videos, obvs), or the immediate answer to every question that passes through my mind. All I’m saying is that boundaries are good and maybe I don’t have to be either a slave or a luddite. Though I am still secretly hoping for a gentle techno-collapse that sends us all back to growing veggies and talking on our porches. Okay, I want to be a quasi-luddite. Hey, speaking of Substack, did you read Derek Thompson’s piece on the Death of the American Host? )

Ok, enough of that. Here’s a graduation picture with my mini-me and some wedding photos for those of you who have been around long enough to remember my youngest son (who was 6 when I started writing here!)

An update with books and wanderings coming soon.

Peace,

Tonia

it could Happen::MaY 31, 2026

Early morning on our walk, the dog and I see our gentleman friend. There is no other way to describe him. He is white-haired and mannerly, graciously handsome, as well as generous with the treats, to the delight of my adoring dog. His own dog died a few months ago. “The house is lonely,” he says. “And it seems to expand while I sit there.” His eyes are pale blue, perhaps a little watery now. He gives my dog another treat and she looks like she would shake me off like a bad dream and go on home with him if only I would let her. I would probably let her if he asked, but he doesn’t, and we say goodbye.

At home, there’s a dead robin lying on a rock beside the honeysuckle, its toes extended as if in the midst of some beautiful dance. The dog sniffs and I kneel beside it, curious, see the impossibly twisted neck. It must have been caught mid-flight. A swoop of joy, I decide, before the hard stop.

There is homework to do: a final project about time and our modern horror vacui – an art term meaning the fear of empty space. I am watching videos of a young musician who is taking a year off from the internet. They record monthly updates on a camcorder and a friend posts them. “I am starting to realize how long an hour is,” they say. “Time stretches and stretches. I feel like I’m extending my life.” I think of the gentleman in his lonely, expanding house. Part of my project is a multi-week experiment in which I, too, try to limit my use of screens. I am on day three. Somewhere around noon I realize I have been watching YouTube videos about so-much-protein even though not watching YouTube videos is the first item on my project parameters list. I turn off my laptop and try to read a book in which the author argues there is no viable future for humanity which includes the internet. I think I agree with him. I write a few pages in my journal about the musician’s commitment and discoveries, about my own conviction that the internet is killing human connection. By 4:00 I discover myself watching a video about the styles I absolutely must not wear this summer and go outside to haul branches to the burn pile for a while.

I stop at the coop to say hello to the new chicks. I swore I would never get chickens again, but coyotes took one of the geese pair a few weeks ago and there is nothing sadder than a lonely goose. The new babies have perked him right up. He honks at me a few times and struts around the pen, chest out, while the chicks fizzle around his feet.

A half hour outdoors and I am full of fresh air and conviction. A swoop of joy. I will never watch another YouTube video again. If the internet disappears tomorrow I will be better for it. The rest of my life will be full of stretched time. I will feel like I am living forever.

It could happen.

\|/

Hello friends.  It is June! In a couple of weeks I will be graduating and shifting my life around a bit. I will still be studying (I am starting an MFA in the fall) but I hope to be writing a lot more: here, there, everywhere. I will keep this blog as usual, but I’m planning on posting on Substack as well, for those who prefer to do their reading there. That will be a summer project, however. This summer feels full of projects and possibilities already. I’m really looking forward to it, despite all the dreaded heat warnings I keep hearing. *eep*

How about you? Plans? Fears? Hopes?

---

Reading: Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World//Jonathan Crary – The polemic I mentioned above. If you have a love/hate with the internet and late-stage capitalism, you might like this one.

I paired that with Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock – (looks like this one has had a name update. I have an earlier edition.) I’m not going to lie, I think How to Do Nothing is a better book, but I did get some good things out of this. Mainly a reminder to re-visit Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

Transcription//Ben Lerner - Lerner wants to think about how media and memory are related. The novel asks some interesting questions, but it didn’t wow me the way it did others.

Orlando//Virginia Woolf – speaking of how we relate to time: Woolf erases the boundaries of bodies, gender, and mortality with Orlando. Fascinating book.

Currently reading: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek//Annie Dillard – if anyone can inspire me to stay off the internet…

Practice//Rosalind Brown – a novel about an Oxford undergraduate working on an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Deliciously slow and meditative.

Watching: We are really enjoying Widow’s Bay. It’s billed horror/comedy but the horror is pretty light. I am notorious for not finding comedies funny (I know, I know) but this one does it for me.

Leith Ross’ Screen-Free video updates

Listening: Dove Ellis.

Inspired by:  Ann Esselystn’s 2 minute 52 sec Guinness record dead hang at 90!

I named all the new chicks after early women artists: Clare Leighton, Fanny Burney, Rosa Bonheur, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, and Gwen John

Lastly:

Celebrating 35 years with this amazing guy!

That’s all for now.

Peace keep you, friends!

tonia

a follow up :: February 6, 2026

“Even so we knew all the time that…some day the landmarks would emerge again, and we held to the memory of them; we reminded ourselves and our friends of them; we delighted to find them, in miniature, in individual relations…Those landmarks that had made us a part of society we discovered to be certain elements of fellowship that we came to value for ourselves and for others - all others; and we looked for human beings everywhere and for fellowship.”

~Wm Stafford, Down In My Heart: Peace Witness In Wartime

Just a couple of days ago I was walking around campus with a friend after our film class discussing what the Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni might have been trying to say in his 1960 film, La Notte. The film, made in the shadow of Mussolini’s fascism, looks at the rather ordinary struggles of a married couple, but it puts this struggle in the context of the larger cultural shifts happening in 1960’s Italy. While my friend and I walked, we were only a few miles from where, the previous Saturday, ICE agents had gassed peaceful protestors — including children and families — and I thought about this, the way that upheaval and resistance happen on the same plane as the minutiae of our lives and somehow, we are required to do both. It’s a lot for a body and mind to process.

I am not naturally the type to lead a rally or seek out large gatherings. I seek out conversation and intimacy, ground-level kinds of assistance. I think we need both the large and loud as well as the small and quiet if we are going to rescue this country back from the terror of the Trump administration and the people who support it (or address any of the other myriad crises we are facing.) So yes, there is an urgent need for speaking up, braving the real threat of tear gas or militia-haunted voting lines. But it is equally vital that we engage in continual small actions that build fellowship and promote human connection: like film discussions, quitting the consumption cycle, visiting lonely parents, sending money, making meals for people, reading books to educate ourselves on issues, and making and experience art. I will be doing many of these things. But almost none of them will make it into this space. We live in a time when performing substitutes for action. Daily, we discover that people present themselves as one thing while secretly supporting and engaging in the worst kinds of behaviors. Anyone can post words and pictures and pretend to care. At the end of the day, only we can know if we are actually interested in justice and willing to change our lives to make it happen. Only we know the particular opportunities and needs that we are suited to meet. So I say, go do all kinds of good work, whatever is before you to do, my friends. Love the hell out of people. You don’t need to keep the receipts.

Some things I am reading and thinking right now:

~ One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This // Omar El Akkad I am lucky enough to get to hear El Akkad speak semi-regularly at literary events around town and appreciate his work so much. In this book, which won the National Book Award, he confronts the passivity with which Americans have responded to the Palestinian genocide.

~Reflections on how writers can respond in dark times What is the place of restorative narratives in a time of crisis? Modern literature loves a cynical, bare-all story, and I think those can be vital, but maybe we are in need of something else right now too.

~ Is your social life missing something? Ezra Klein hosts Priya Parker to talk about hospitality, gathering, and making time for community. I love this episode SO MUCH. Practical tips for real people on how to make gathering doable. I’ve also ordered the book. We are engulfed by artificiality. Making face-to-face connections is an act of resistance by itself.

~ Softening the Clenched Fist A longtime reader and friend posted this from Krista Tippet in the comments of the last post. “one of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a countercultural tenderness.”

~Vermiglio Speaking of Italian films. This award-winning stunner from Maura Delpero stayed with me for days. It’s incredibly quiet and spare, the kind of film that is more like a piece of art than entertainment. I love stories about the lives of women and this one has so many gorgeous domestic and costume details too.

~Held // Anne Michaels. 2024 Booker Prize winner. From Michaels’ herself : “Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now. We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to.” This is a great example of restorative narrative. I loved this book. Michaels is a poet first, and it shows in the way she crafts the novel. Less about plot, more about ideas. I am going to read it again with a pencil in hand.

~Stand With Minnesota - All kinds of links for donations that support everything from legal rights to help with pets who have been left behind by detained immigrant families. Look for the helpers and support them!

That’s all for now. Guard your peace, friends. Turn it off, turn it down, make space for your body.

Much love.

Tonia

What I want to say :: January 2026

I’ve been thinking so long about what to say in this space: Resist, Hang in there, I can’t believe it either, Be vigilant, Nourish yourself, Find someone to be kind to, Fly a protest flag… nothing seems right. I’m as devastated, angry, horrified, and searching as the rest of you and I don’t know what to say about it.

If I skim the news at all these days, it is for stories of resistance. I want to know what ordinary people like me are doing and fortify my imagination for responses. I hope I will act if the chance comes to me. I hope I put my body and my privilege in front of whatever cowardice arises. I hope my voice is loud when I need to shout. I hope I have words to say. I hope I am brave.

I’ve got friends who are marchers and others who are builders and I don’t know where I fit between them, but I’ve had Kyce Bello’s poem in the footer of this website for several years now and I returned to it again today to find a little thread of possibility for myself in these terrible times.

Make me a figure with a womb

And relict heart. Make me

the seam that holds the tattered land together

and let me be the speaker that sings

rise, rise

all across the shapely ground.

There is a place in this struggle for the healers and menders too.

This past weekend would have been the poet William Stafford’s birthday. Stafford was a pacifist - a conscientious objector in WW2 - a position that almost no one could understand. But for Stafford, violent action “signal[ed] a failure of imagination.” “Restraint,” he said, “must come from citizens…coercion by violence has hardened much of the world; that feeling lasts. But moderating it is the patient, worthy job.”

Almost everyone I know is numbing themselves against the sharp edges of this terrible now. It is safer to become hard than to bleed. To stay soft and hopeful, open to healing, takes real strength. Stafford’s son Kit said, “my father’s ambition was boundless. A target of his own country’s disdain, even hatred, he had begun his mission of universal reconciliation.”

I am not thinking about a kind of reconciliation that gives hate a pass, or ignores the violent actions and inactions of selfish people. I am thinking about the kind of courage that remains in place, that does the terrifying work of resistance, but also the small work of unplugging from the machine, consuming less, creating safe homes, inviting people in, listening to fears and frustrations, and being forcefully and unapologetically human in a world that wants to turn us all into fodder for the money-and-war machines.

Maybe, what I want to say (to myself and anyone else who needs to hear it) in this time of unbelievable disorientation is: Be hungry for more than what this stunted, sham, plastic world is offering. It runs on fear and scarcity, so cultivate abundance and curiosity. Make connections. Make a coffee date. If you have extra, send some money to the helpers, the fighters, the guardians. Turn off the TV/computer/phone/or whatever damn device is cluttering your mind. Know less about every day’s events and go deep on birds or poetry or physics or history. Feed your imagination. Play a board game. Walk down the street with a smile. Support the library. Read the old books. Eat dinner at your table with candles lit. Donate dog food to the shelter. Memorize a joke and tell it to everyone. Cuss a little. Have a pastry. Take a walk. Learn to juggle. Climb a tree. Write a really bad poem. LIVE. What we’re here for is not just a righteous posture or the destruction of the bad guys or the freedom to Netflix until our eyes bleed. It’s so much more. Be a body, be a spirit, be a voice, a vote, a seed, a light, a life.

Sending love,

tonia

EDITED TO ADD: After I set this to post, there was another shooting in Minnesota. I hope you will read my words here and know that I am not offering platitudes about how we should respond to acts of murder and injustice, but rather a way of carrying on in the day to day while we live our lives with the reality of injustice. My heart is so heavy for all who are suffering and are confronting these terrible acts face to face.

• Quotes from Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, Kim Stafford

Nothing Is Lost :: July 2025

My father is gone now, swept swiftly away from us at the end of April by a riptide of cancer. I am still reorienting myself, like some digital map spinning up, then down, looking for center. It is the end of possibilities that hurts the most, the end of what should have been, and wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this new kind of grief. I’ve never been prone to high emotion; malaise is more my usual path, followed by self-recrimination and doubt, as if the cancer – or the relationship – was my doing alone. We are two months on. How strange it is that someone so essential to my own being can just…stop.

  Meanwhile, the world.

I’ve barely let myself acknowledge the news, but it trickles in. I don’t let myself go too far down any path of despair or fear because I know it accomplishes nothing. We are in the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable system and we will have to live our part.

“Forgive me these shadows I cling to, good people, trying to hold quiet in my prologue. Hawks cling the barrens wherever I live. The world says, “Dog eat dog.” ~ “Some Shadows”/William Stafford

Once a week now, I go to a Mindful Gardening class at the university’s learning garden. The class is a motley group of ages and orientations but our instructor is one of those beautiful women who looks like she emerged from nature itself, all soft fabrics and earth colors, a gentle voice. She brings her newborn tied in a sling around her chest and invites us to listen to the earth, and we all do, without embarrassment. We are hungry for mothering, I think. All of us with our different stories, all of us needing reassurance, all of us suffering from the same fractured anxieties.

We pull weeds under the blistering sun, turn the compost pile, encourage the native plants to grow. Sometimes we talk to each other, but mostly, we are quiet and busy. Our jittery bodies shape themselves around the plants as if we were one of them – and we are – thick-stalked and branching, reaching toward both sun and soil for connection.

When I signed up for this class weeks ago, I chose it because my brain was grief-dull. I needed something that let my focus and concentration off the hook; I didn’t realize it would be healing. I put my hands in the soil and I think of my dad’s body going back to the earth, of the beautiful circle of our existence turning and returning, of the physical reality of our bodies becoming dust and being taken up again into the bodies of other creatures in a long and continual renewing. Nothing is lost. We are literally made of this renewal – the bodies of all our ancestors live inside us. We are all, day by day, heading back to our beginning. When my dad died everyone talked about his going home to an eternal somewhere in the sky. I prefer to think of him here all around me, present now and always in leaf and bud and bone. And I find this makes the rest of the world bearable too. Whatever dies - nations or species or eras - is composted into the next turning, the next flowering, however strange or far away that may be.

Grief can be like standing on a distant mountain. It takes you out of the day to day world and expands your horizon. Suddenly you see how short the time really is, how close to your own death you already are. But just recently, I’ve felt myself returning to the place where we all live again, close up to the frustrations and fears of this moment. I suspect that it is nature, quiet, and connection that will make living in this now possible, just as they have made accepting this loss possible. But the truth of now is that nature, quiet, and connection are under immediate threat. I know it is going to take radical determination to regain — and retain — those things in our lives. Maybe I will write more about that later, if you would like.

~Thank you so much for your kind notes over the past months. I know some of you have been facing similar things and my heart is with you. I hope you are finding your own places of peace and connection.

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  After the initial fog of loss – and many hours of mindless TV watching – I’m making July as screen-free as possible. I use the Brick app to make my phone (almost) a dumb phone and I’m not watching TV or movies.  

Instead, I’m spending as much time as I can outdoors. I’ve started observing and jotting down nature notes again, something I haven’t done since I started school five years ago. I’m remembering patterns I once took time to notice and had forgotten I knew - cycles of plants and wildlife that return to my awareness like old friends. Right now, the young crows are begging loudly for food in the mornings and the thimbleberries are ripe. Soon it will be time for blackberry picking and dahlias. I plan on observing every inch of this summer and beyond.

~ I’ve taken up knitting again (with the help of my lovely DIL) and I’m working on a vest for the fall. It is so exciting to see a garment take shape under my needles.

~ And I’m reading, of course. A few standouts:

• Sara Baume:  I loved Seven Steeples, but I’ve added A Line Made by Walking to my favorites now too. The story of an artist working her way through grief and depression, it is finely observed and wonderfully quiet. Baume’s character struggles with her identity as an artist, wondering if she has been lying to herself about her talent, but all the time we as readers can see that she moves and thinks and observes as an artist. It’s a meditation on the ways we are unkind to ourselves and hold unrealistic expectations and, in its own way, permission to be small and unambitious. A nice companion to this is Baume’s Handiwork, which is her own meditations on her life as an artist.

• Karen Russell: The Antidote. I love Russell’s inventiveness and embrace of the off-beat. This new novel is set in the Dust Bowl and looks at the ways we willfully and collectively forget our sins.

•  Belinda Bauer: The Impossible Thing (audiobook). Terrific narration. This is based on the real story of the Metland eggs and the history of egg collecting, which is a lot more exciting than it sounds.

• Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths. This is the first time I’ve read Borges and I understand why people say he’s so singular. (I can see his influence though, in books like Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, maybe even in Ted Chiang’s work, if you like any of those writers.) But this collection feels so timely. It deals a lot with the recursive nature of the world. Things repeat, time overlaps, things exist now because they existed before. Lately I’ve been stuck on the story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius”. It’s about a fictional world called Tlön which is created by a “secret and benevolent society” of academics. They invent an entire language, mythology, numeracy, philosophy and science for Tlön over a great many years.   The society’s core belief is that nothing is real unless it is perceived, or in other words, ideas create reality – and they prove this by slowly hiding their false “history” inside actual cultural records. Over time, Tlön, whose “existence” is now sprinkled into encyclopedias and textbooks and historical records, becomes real to future people who don’t know it was an intentional fiction to begin with. (It's almost like this has happened before. Maybe we should all be reading literature all the time before it’s too late?)

• Sharon Olds: Arias. I read one of these a day and I’m pretty much always astounded by her fearlessness. From “Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater”

• “Oh, Mom. Come sit
  with me at this stone table at the bottom
  of the Bay, here is a barnacle of
  egg custard, here is your tiny
  spoon with your initials, sup with me
  at dawn on your first day—we are all
  the dead, I am not apart from you,
  for long, except for breath, except for
  everything.”

As always, I love to hear from you. Share what you’re reading or how you’re surviving our crazy world.

For now,

Tonia

 P.S. I got new kittens and they have been such a bright spot.

Wendell

Wallace