Where has the summer gone?? Egad! Just yesterday, back in May, when the lilacs were blooming and a spring breeze blew in through my window, I let myself sink into the luxury of it all, only to wake up one morning and find it is July-pushing-toward August, and the lilacs are long gone, as are the rhododendron and the honey locusts and the roses. Even the blackberries have raced from blossom to berry to briar, and those cool breezes have been stilled by some invisible hand, hot

Well I left my happy home To see what I could find out I left my folk and friends With the aim to clear my mind out Cat Stevens’s song, “On the Road to Find Out” was pretty much my anthem during my Chasing Light journey. Hitting the highway and headed for the next town, I’d crank up the speakers and rock out, believing, as I had since I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman, that Cat (now Yusef) understood something fundamental about me, about my raw hunger to know all

It is Day Six of my eighteen-day residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. VCCA is in Amherst, Virginia, home of Sweet Briar College, and within easy driving distance of Lynchburg to one side and Charlottesville to another. I am staying put, though, happy to be sequestered here on this renovated dairy farm. We work in an old friendly concrete block barn with a cozy kitchen surrounded by small, well-appointed studios. An eighth of a mile down the lane is the resi