Tiny House Living

Reflections and advice based on years of thrift and simple living in a tiny house on wheels.

Poetry

Fantastic and earthy, playful and melancholy poems on such topics as love, nakedness, disillusionment, hidden creatures, and breakfast.

Geekdom

Thoughts on—and free resources for—fantasy, science fiction, worldbuilding, tabletop role-playing, and game design.

Homesteading

Gardening, cooking, and sustainable living on the land in Northern Michigan.

DIY

Thrifty DIY and other creative projects made from wood, bytes, or anything in between.

Reimagined Culture

At the intersection of fantasy worldbuilding, social action, and homesteading awaits the wondrous ten acre realm of Habdur.

Recent Posts

Patreon-supported poem from Wednesday, February 28, 2018:

Hunger

Black bear
How could it be
this powerful, this animal, or
how did I not know of it
till now? There are many monsters,
many types
of people—I've never understood

vampires with their stable schedules
of predation, zombies moaning for brains
right out in public, recognizable,
ghosts no longer blooded, living …
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Patreon-supported poem from Wednesday, January 31, 2018:

Ordained

Dead fern in snow
When the poets of old
wrote of star-crossed lovers
they were partly right
and partly wrong
due to a tragedy of scope and scale
and obsession with particular causality,
working backwards
or worse, forwards—
while stars like these ordain the just-rightness
of you and me, it could have been
any …
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Patreon-supported poem from Thursday, January 25, 2018:

Whirling

Trees, sunlight, and shadow in Habdur

"the way he cries out for the majesty
he's lost,
give me that longing!"

—Rumi, "Hangover Remorse"

I don't know
if Rumi was bipolar
but I know he whirled,
students scrambling
to write down the poems
he spontaneously spoke
about pain and loss
and the beauty
all around
before he …
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Blog post from Thursday, January 11, 2018:

The Noble Peasantry: Reimagining Class

wild daisies

"If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself."

—Henry David Thoreau

Though not fantastic in itself—far from it—a clear division of class into the land-owning nobility and the land-tending peasantry is a near-ubiquitous trope of …

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Patreon-supported poem from Tuesday, November 28, 2017:

Heirlooms

upright grand piano, tilted
Grandma taught us all
that her sickly parents
sent her down
to the old-timey version
of what we all came to know
as Pic 'N' Save
with a pocketful of nickels and old-timey coupons
to buy old-timey expired food
so big girl Grandma could portion out little pieces
for her …
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© 2018 Garrison Benson (except where otherwise noted).