The Household Muse

Co-author Tom Ireland
Tres Chicas Books, 2020
(140 pages, $16.00)

Excerpts from The Household Muse:

YOU TELL ME THAT EARLY ON in our partnership I said I’d still love you if you lost your teeth, but not if you stopped writing. I don’t remember making this remark, but I know why I made it: writing is a solitary craft, and how fortuitous, at last, to find companionship in it. Now there’s this verging conversation, an almost autumn light pouring over our landscape. (“An Almost Autumn Light,” Anne Valley-Fox)

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE that we may yet have one quarter of our lives to live. What difference would that make in how we choose to live? Jasper, born a little more than a week ago, will be twenty-eight on my hundredth birthday. We could spend our hypothetical quarter century to sponsor an immigrant family or clean up the Pacific Ocean or, obeying Wendell Berry’s exhortation to “think little,” raise earthworms in the backyard and bequeath them to the earth when we’re gone. (”Hypothesis,” Tom Ireland)