My Top 10 Books of 2021
As with all my annual lists, the books themselves could have been published in any year, but they must be new to me. I didn’t read as many as I had hoped this year, but I am happy I was able to broaden my reading world with a lot of new authors I hadn’t explored before. If you hadn’t read any of these yet, I highly recommend them!
Five Poems for Halloween
The trees are blooming orange and yellow and the wind rattles the leaves down the street, so that means Halloween is almost here again! To celebrate, I dug into my archives to pull up five of my more Halloween-centric pieces for you. The first two appeared in the wonderful but now deceased Lonesome October Lit, an online journal that focused on eerie and spooky poems and stories. (All pieces are archived online!) The last three pieces are from my book We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, which is available online or through me (if you want a signed copy). The book contains many more poems and pieces like those below. I hope you enjoy these pieces and that they get you into the Halloween spirit!
A Look Back at Our Challenge to Find the Greatest Soda for Ice Cream Floats
Two years ago this summer, two ambitious scientists commenced the long, laborious, diabetic adventure to discover the best soda to use for an ice cream float. Using Stewart’s Vanilla as the constant throughout, and breaking the dozens of soda options down into six specific categories, these two meticulous analysts…no, dare I say HEROES…taste tested each soda and vanilla ice cream combo using a rigorous system of metrics and scoring to determine just what soda is the best for floats. Th results were not what either expected, and you can read about each part of the investigation within.