Sealey Challenge Video for Listening for Low Tide

My wife created a video featuring my chapbook, Listening for Low Tide. The video can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho6YBOuMlJQ

Choeofpleirn Press Winning Chapbook for 2025

 

Christine Andersen's To Maggie Wherever You've Gone was the winner of the Choeofpleirn Press chapbook contest.

Our judge made this comment:

To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone is a chapbook-length elegy to a young woman who committed suicide by hanging herself. While these poems contain specific details, the poems often end with resonant images and metaphors, allowing the “words [to]…hit the floor screaming” before the poet, in visiting the hill where this woman's ashes were scattered, believes that "the earth /  had swallowed my folly, / entombed my grief." These poems move from grief to bewilderment before repeating these steps. Ultimately, the poet reaches a kind of recognition in that the desire to kill ourselves may sometimes exist, and it takes “feel[ing] the noose / tied taut against the neck…to be absolutely sure that we / would never jump.”

This book is available at Amazon and through bookstores like Barnes & Noble. Electronic copies are available as well.

Early Attempts at Photography

One of the few things that I enjoyed in high school was learning to develop pictures. My father had an old Voigtländer 35mm camera that he let me use. I was limited to using black and white film because it wasn't possible to develop color film at that time in the darkroom available to me. The process for color film was much more complicated. 

I had hoped to pursue photography when I enlisted in the Air Force. The recruiter said that it was a possibility. I didn't learn until I took my physical that I was colorblind, which limited my career choices.

I am adding a few pictures from when I was in high school. I was going through the drawers in my office over Christmas break and discovered these pictures. The last picture here was an occasion in which I placed one negative over another one.

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Downloading Music Simply by Having a Library Card

 

Over the past few years or so, my local library offered patrons the option of streaming music and downloading music using a program called Freegal. Originally, patrons were allowed five downloads of songs per week; later the number of downloads was reduced to three songs per week. If some songs were too long, that is, longer than eight minutes, they were not included as downloadable. It took nearly a month to download a complete album. The downloaded music from Freegal consisted of a lower bitrate than the music downloaded from Bandcamp—256kbps as opposed to 350kbps. For me at least, there wasn’t a noticeable difference once the music was burned to a CD. My computer is old enough to still include a CD drive.

From what I hear, my local library will be ending its subscription to Freegal in January, so downloading music for free will no longer be an option for patrons at some point.

The best things I downloaded from Freegal are Jan Harbeck’s Balanced, Yuri Honing’s Bluebeard, and Matt Carmichael’s Marram. I have to admit that I feel guilty for not paying for this music. I can only hope that the musicians were compensated in some way by Freegal.