I created this website for two reasons, or two readers.
For those looking to hire me as a writer, I wanted to have one place where most of my published and unpublished work could be found for review.
For those looking for a kindred spirit, I open to you my poems and essays. Not all of these pieces are easy, pleasant, or hopeful. Many of them could use revision or further work. But it is not the job of poems or essays to be anything to anyone. They just demand to be written into the world and, for better or worse and because the clock is ticking, here they are now: as is.
The name @drivebymuses arose as I tried to self-define why or how I write. I am not the type, like my beloved Mary Oliver, to sit over a poem crafting and recrafting it for days or weeks or months. Nor do I write more than a third draft of an essay before I just canʻt look at it anymore, and those drafts come so fast they step on the heels of the draft before.
What happens with me is more like a drive-by assault of the Muses, those amorphous beings who hover in the ethers waiting to bestow inspiration. In my case, they seem to trigger the sudden, urgent need to write now and make it pure and maybe painful and then they zoom away, forcing me to drop whatever it is I am doing and find something to write on, or write with.
The Muses are not at all gentle with me and never have been. Relentless bitches, truly. And they definitely do not come when called.
If you enjoy anything I have written here, let me know. The writer may write for the self, but if there is no reader then it is like the words never were, and surely that is not the point of anything.
