In 1937, W. H. Auden published “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” inside a sequence called Twelve Songs. The poem is a list of comic guesses about what love might look like, smell like, sound like, do. Each refrain stanza ends in the same plea: tell me. The song is a young man’s question asked across a noisy room, hoping someone older will answer.
Continue reading → An Answer to Auden: The Truth About Love, 1937 to 2026
I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.
Continue reading → A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form
I have been thinking a great deal lately about living and dying, and about the strange, stubborn human hunger to leave something meaningful behind. The faces of those I have known who have already passed return to me in quiet moments, and I find myself watching those who are, even now, nearing the end of their own stories. I also include my final braided prairie knot in that wondering. In the background of these thoughts runs a deeper worry, a shadow that lengthens each day: the growing political instability that presses in on the goodness of life and threatens the fragile hope we carry in our personal lives. I wonder, in darker hours, if all the labor, all the love, all the sacrifice we invest in this world will ever prove to be worth it. And then, as if called back from the edge of despair, I remember what my friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, told me as he lay dying at age 91.
There are times when children are right and parents are wrong. We’re so often trained to think that children know nothing when they actually know quite a lot when it comes to their thoughts and feelings. It’s just too easy for parents to overrule their children just because they “say so” and because they’re older and taller and heavier than the kids below them. Sometimes parents need to obey their children.
“When Sunny Gets Blue” is one of the greatest Blues/Jazz songs ever written. You can sing it slow and creeping with an oozing loss, or you can snap it up and make the song fast and raspy. The lyric is especially keen — you can take it as a comment on a personality, or a conundrum of living in the sunshine when the world is dark around you:
When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gray and cloudy,
Then the rain begins to fall, pitter-patter, pitter-patter,
Love is gone, so what can matter,
Ain’t no new lover man come to call.
Many of us probably have a Sunny or two in our lives — some versions gloomier than others, but today, I want to share a 10-second memory of a ray of sun. Her friends and co-workers call her “Sunshine” and the name fits her without a fog.
Continue reading → When Sunny Gets Blue and Sunshine Blows Through the Blues
by Nancy McDaniel
Not my mother
Nor my stepmother
Nor even an official godmother
But my “almost mom”
Who has loved me for over 60 years
I’m an “almost sister” to her two sons
For those same 60 years.
Maybe better than a “real” mom
Because we are first of all friends
I can talk to her more honestly and openly
Than I could to any of my “other” moms
Laughing over silly mistakes
That we each make
Or things we both forget
Helping each other with projects
Reminiscing about old recipes, old parties
And funny stories from 50 years ago:
Our lives are performed in dramatic arcs that intersect and reflect and repulse and reflex: Are we divinely predestined or merely reflexive? The other day, I was thinking back on when I was a young child and, feeling alone and frustrated, I would climb a cherry tree in our backyard to get away from all the noise and hubbub of earthly living. From my vantage point 20 feet in the air, I could smell the wind and get a sense of a horizon that was far and above my current station.
Continue reading → The Asynchronous Lives in Parallel Project
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