A little more than a week ago, I learned about the passing of one of my students, and I decided to go back and reread all of our correspondence—more than ten years of it. Lest you picture me with some sort of trove of handwritten letters or masterful plan of organization, know that my system is just never to delete emails (this can be embarrassing when anyone sees my inbox, but it has worked for me so far).

I first met Dr. Elizabeth Campbell in 2016, when she wrote to me to ask for advice about creative writing classes to take at NC State. Becky, as I knew her, was in her early sixties and taking a break from full-time oncology practice to spend more time with her children, who were in their last year of high school, and to pursue her interest in writing. She didn’t lead with “I am a doctor” or even her very impressive educational background (degrees from Duke and UNC, a faculty position at UNC Medical School), but told me a little about past classes where she’d done a lot of reading, and the kinds of things she was interested in writing about. She wanted to join the very beginner classes in creative nonfiction and fiction, and after I learned a little about her background, had to be talked into taking intermediate classes.

I shared my syllabi and told her about the classes I was teaching; I wanted her to join my advanced nonfiction class. “I am excited if intimidated,” Becky wrote. “I’ve never taken a writing course of any kind, so the writing I’ve done in school and professionally was formally ‘schooled’ by my college prep English teacher in a rural Midwestern town and by the process of writing the kinds of things that I previously described.”

Becky remained so characteristically humble and curious about others that I learned new things about her life and career in her obituary, which was written by her husband of more than 30 years, Dr. Mark Lefebvre. I did not know, for example, that before becoming a doctor herself Becky had worked to help Vietnamese physicians fleeing the fall of Saigon settle into practice in rural American communities. Or that, while in college, she'd studied in the West Bank of Palestine and at Duke’s Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. I don’t think I knew that in 1992, when she joined a private oncology practice in Raleigh, she was the only female physician.

Despite her own vast and fascinating experience, Becky’s first formal piece for my class in advanced nonfiction was a profile piece about someone working outside of her own field. Becky herself did so much community work, but this piece is firmly centered on Jeanne Tedrow, cofounder of Passage Home, a Southeast Raleigh nonprofit dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty by providing affordable housing, food assistance, community gardening, and career development (Becky had worked, before medical school, with rural sharecroppers and food scarcity issues). The piece begins with a snappy description of Jeanne and her role, and moves quickly (as we practiced in class!) to scene-setting:

I parked on the muddy shoulder of an un-curbed street across from a square, generic cinder block building where Passage Home is located, and entered a large open room with an industrial kitchen on the right. Women were engaged in casual banter as they prepared the next meal for homeless or homebound neighborhood residents and for the upcoming tsunami of after-school children.

Jeanne recently told me that Passage Home, which now manages 114 transitional living units for men and women men unable to obtain a mortgage or secure a traditional lease--people leaving incarceration, or violent homes, or simply without the job skills or opportunities necessary to earn a living in a suburban community like ours--began with a project to refurbish one house in Southeast Raleigh, soon after she and her husband moved here in the 1980’s. Growth since has been spurred by working with the community, with local church leaders, with a few business leaders, and with public and private grants attempting to address identified problems, create job opportunities, and revitalize and stabilize gutted neighborhoods. They’ve been fighting the steady, insidious ingrowth of poverty in an area celebrated in shiny magazines distributed nationwide as one of the country’s most attractive places to live and work.

I see so much of Becky in this passage and in the essay overall. Her humility as well as her ease in places where real work and struggle is happening—the un-curbed streets, the mud, the casual talks over meal prep. Her ability to balance a view of the positive and hopeful work happening (grants, job opportunities, revitalization) with the systemic problems of poverty, gentrification, and racism.

In other essays I learned about her work as an ER physician in Siler City, where she regularly treated Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee) and her driver/assistant, who according to Becky would sometimes get into weekend bar fights (necessitating an ER trip himself) just to get a break from the beloved-but-irascible TV star. In Alamance County, Becky treated Blanche Taylor Moore (aka the Banana Pudding Killer) who was by then on death row. Becky wrote gorgeous, harrowing essays about her experience treating AIDS patients in the early days of the epidemic, when some doctors would not even enter their hospital rooms. She wrote about being an oncologist within the constraints of managed care, and she studied the (then-newish) field of narrative medicine to understand where her own values came from, and how our broken healthcare system undermined them.

Becky eventually took fiction classes with me as well. We had many, many conversations about her essays- and stories-in-progress, the essays and stories she read and loved in class, and about life as working moms. Becky’s energy, vast experience, and search for the truth meant that her essays, in particular, would sometimes grow quite long, but they were never self-indulgent or overwritten or even rambling. She just had a lot to say, and many directions for research and thinking.

Having a nontraditional student like Becky is one of the (many!) joys of teaching at a public university like mine. Her presence made every class better; she befriended and got to know many of the undergraduates, and I know they learned a lot from her. I think she learned from them, too—she was a genuine admirer of their drafts and perspectives, and a deep listener in workshop.

Becky was also so kind to me and Beatrice, I think because she understood that being a working mom, going through the tenure process (Bea was only two!) was tough. After the first semester was over, she invited me and Bea to meet her frolicking black lab puppies, and I remember that Mark made us a delicious dinner. I think I even told her when I had my first mammogram call-back, and she got me through it.

In her last years, Becky was sick, and I know that she worked mightily to be there for her twin children’s medical school graduations and match days, and for the celebration of her daughter’s wedding. I last saw her at a fundraiser for Josh Stein at Jill McCorkle’s home—she was with Mark, and looked beautiful and well (very like the photo above). We talked mostly about our wonderful children. But I also know (from email) that soon after that she was ill, and had to face her mortality and what it would mean to leave the world she loved and cared so much for.

In that very first essay, about Jeanne Tedrow, Becky confronted some of those questions while thinking about Jeanne’s succession plans for Passage Home (and perhaps her own desire to step back from full-time oncology practice):

How do you know when you’ve done enough, when it’s time to step back and release the reigns? How do you give sail to an organization started in your car, with your two-year-old daughter in the back seat, when your organization employs more than 35 people, or houses more than 140, or oversees an annual budget of over four million dollars, some of which involves HUD money, along with other federal programs with strict documentary provisions and requirements that someone else might not complete as well? How do any of us leave as much undone as we see in front of us and claim the rest of who we are? How do you leave?

This was before AI made teaching so hard. Before our current wave of censorship, which I know that Becky hated. Before the current vast cancellations of SNAP benefits and the utter dismantling of voting rights. Before Project 2025 or its attacks on education, environmental protections, healthcare, and more. Long before the appointment of an absolute quack and conspiracy theorist as Health Secretary brought back measles.

You get to encounter a lot of wisdom in a classroom. I don’t think Becky ever considered an essay or story written in one of my classes “finished,” but I am so glad to have them to reread and think about and share with Mark, if he wants them (I feel okay about determining that she’d allow that).

I am loving my students this semester, even (especially?) as they face so! many! challenges! I don’t think I’ll ever have another student like Becky, but I’ll have students of so many other kinds, with wisdom and perspective and questions they want to answer. I’m excited to see them each week, and to read the work they now handwrite in little journals before developing into typed stories and essays (thanks, AI). And as long as I can manage it, I will keep their emails in my overflowing inbox.

Some more things to tell you about this week—look for a Thursday newsletter from Bea about an exciting development for her! (Hint: it may be dog-related and magnificent.)

How are you doing, Frog Troublers? Lots of love from us.

P.S. Some of us are gathering on Wednesday to protest three of the worst people on the planet coming to the Carolina Inn for “fireside chats” (it’s gonna be 97 on Wednesday, so that’s just weird). I think Becky would be there if she could. See you there?

“It’s a fairy reading nook,” she explained. All week, she and her cousin and BFF left fairy nooks and houses all over the island:

I love watching kids make fairy houses—the concentration and creativity, the exclusion of the rest of the world. The belief, wholehearted or hopeful, that fairies will arrive and dance and eat and sleep and read and take baths.

At Clapping Hands Farm, a counselor and expert crafter named Jupiter often helps in the fairy forest. How do you help in the fairy forest? Harriet told me that another camper, a boy, liked to tell her and her friends that fairies weren’t real. “He said he was going to go home and Google are fairies real,” she said. “And I told him, Google isn’t real.” (Harriet believes that things that live only on screens and devices are not real in the same way that sticks and leaves and rosemary bushes are real.)

Their difference of opinion could have devolved into arguing or fighting or tears, but Jupiter kindly but firmly intervened. “You can’t be here if you’re going to say that,” Harriet remembers her telling the boy. I imagine she redirected him to some other activity—on the farm, there are so many things to do and places to do them! Did he leave? I asked Harriet. Of course! she said, surprised that I would imagine anyone disobeying Jupiter.

I am not sure how old Jupiter is—teenager? college-age?—but I can see her becoming a teacher, professionally. She’s a teacher now, of course, by being a camp counselor. But her creativity, talent, and calm intelligence would be welcome in many kinds of public school classrooms.

Tomorrow, many teachers will return to their classrooms to clean and organize and write lessons and meet with colleagues and prepare for the new school year. It’s always been an arduous week, but usually filled with the kind of hope and creativity that animates the construction of a fairy forest. It is the creation of a protected space, even a sacred space, for the teacher and her students.

This year, at least in North Carolina, teachers are returning to their work with a new set of laws around our work. At my university, we received an infographic (below) that confusingly outlines what counts as a “divisive concept.” “Divisive concepts” connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion are prohibited.

In all my years of teaching, I’ve never heard a teacher tell a classroom that one sex or race was superior, or maintain that anyone should be discriminated against because of sex or race.

I have heard, instead, teachers work hard to protect children being bullied—for their race or sex, for their beliefs, for the clothes they wear or don’t wear, for the places they come from. It might mean protecting a trans student so she can learn without harassment or self-loathing. It might mean protecting a Muslim student’s right to excuse himself to pray. Or, as they do at Clapping Hands Farm, asking a class on a child’s birthday, “How many languages do we know for singing Happy Birthday?” and then allowing each language-speaker to lead the singing.

This protection falls apart when teachers—many so underpaid that they work second jobs—believe that they are being scrutinized for the promotion of a divisive concept like “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equity,” and even “belonging.” When they fear that they can be fired if someone records them standing up for a child’s rights, or their own right, to exist in the same space as a child from a dominant culture. When they are second-guessed for the books in their classroom, or the routines they maintain, or the discussions they lead or allow.

This week, my own second-year graduate students, who make $20,000 a year to teach writing to undergraduates (more than $2000 in student fees are deducted from their annual pay), were so flummoxed by the chart above that some of them missed the welcome-back party and mocktail hour our department arranged for them.

They recovered later! And read stories, poems, and novel excerpts beautifully and bravely at So and So Books. Many of the excerpts they read would be considered divisive (certainly as direct challenges to the idea of a pure, fair meritocracy). Many of the stories and poems and conversations they will guide students through will challenge their students’ existing ideas because that is what learning is supposed to do—make your world bigger, not smaller.

Tomorrow they will teach, some of them for the first time alone. I know they’ve got this, and I’m going to message them today to tell them. I’m going to message other teachers to tell them thank you, they carved out a safe, protected space and made a difference in my children’s lives. (Thank you, Jen! Thank you, Louise! Thank you, Jupiter!)

Sylvester and I have an event for The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw in Sanford this afternoon, and otherwise the girls and I are swimming, reading, and making things (syllabus for me, fairy house for Harriet, plans to get a dog for Bea).

How about you, Frog Troublers? How are you spending your Sunday? Do you have plans to thank a teacher?

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Lots of love from us.

This week I turned 50! Years old!

I am proud of making it this far and I still have a lot farther to go.

I went to dinner with the girls and our besties.

I met with my union and wore my new Legalize Teaching t-shirt.

I went kayaking and saw bald eagles.

I had a scary mammogram appointment that turned out fine.

Bea and I went to a dog nosework class with Cat.

At the Clapping Hands Farm camp share, I saw many fairy houses, and visited a woodland grocery store made by Harriet and her friends.

On Saturday I threw my own self a party in the same way I have thrown parties for my girls: big gold helium balloons, plentiful table, wonderful friends, sea shanty at cake/candle time.

We ate tomato sandwiches made with our friend David’s perfect sourdough bread and Cat’s delightful aioli. Local tomatoes that we made watercolors of before eating. Pickles from Tommy’s Market and my garden. Many wonderful sides made by my friends. Quiche from Mamie. I made two cakes, both the same (Vivian Howard’s chocolate orange beet cake with walnut-cream cheese icing).

Then we swam in the river until it got dark.

How was your week, Frog Troublers? Cheers to Leo season and all the lionesses.

Love, Belle

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In 2024, after the election, family friends took a trip to DC. They wanted to see the museums, archives, and monuments before Trump took over. I thought this was a good idea but couldn’t bear to do it myself—the idea of interacting with a disappearing reality was too painful. I suppose I am not good at goodbyes, even (hopefully) temporary ones.

In the meantime I have tried to immerse myself in as many functional spaces of care and government as I can. There are so many of them, if you look!

In June the girls and I went to Cherokee. Outside our hotel, we saw elk roaming the streets. The next morning, we boarded an electric school bus and rode with our hosts to the Cherokee Mother Town, which we’d learned about in the history play, Unto these Hills. We saw great fields split into acre plots, where families grow corn and vegetables. We saw the Mother Garden, where functional and medicinal herbs and plants useful from pregnancy through infancy are grown in the shape of a mother’s body. We peeked inside a shed where all the garden tools are kept; they are all electric, and charged from a solar battery. On top of the shed, an instrument monitored the air quality.

My car, meanwhile, was charging up in the Cherokee Boys Club bus lot, which is equipped to charge the entire fleet of all-electric school buses. They’re currently being charged on-grid with conventional energy, but will soon be connected through a microgrid fed by a network of solar canopies. We saw, also, where workers were installing a solar canopy to provide a fast-charging, direct current station outside the public school. All of this work was job-producing (community members learn to install and maintain these new systems), air-quality-improving, community-minded. Though the vast majority of the air pollution that enters the Cherokee Land Trust blows in from elsewhere, the folks who work with EBCI’s Center for Native Health, the Mother Garden, and the Boys Club understand that no one else is coming to fix these problems, and that their work to restore balance can even be a model for other communities.

We had an amazing, beautiful time there.

Fast-forward a month, and I boarded a train to DC while the girls stayed with Mamie in Walkerton. I was headed there for the biennial conference of the American Federation of Teachers, where my union, the AAUP, has affiliate membership. The conference was huge—some 3,000 delegates from all over the country, a multigenerational, multiracial group of people in message tees and union tees who committed to spending a week of their summer inside a dim conference center debating and voting on resolutions about how the union will meet this moment.

Outside, it was very hot—101 actual degrees when I arrived on Wednesday. I have been to DC many times and have even lived there, but I’ve never felt a 101 degree July day. I talked to the girls by phone in the evenings as I trudged around, trying to witness what I could. I saw the drained reflecting pool (it’s behind tall fencing, but you can see it from the Lincoln Memorial steps). The White House loomed over by giant cranes draped with flags. I think in the distance I saw the Arc de Trump model that had been installed for the Great American State Fair, but maybe that was a mirage—it was so hot, even at night, and the streets and open spaces were fairly littered with cones and construction/event debris. All the tourists seemed listless.

Then the smoke rolled in from Canadian wildfires, and it was hard to see anything or be outside without a mask. I read that the wildfires defied firefighters’ usual strategy of starving them of fuel at night—the evening temperatures don’t fall enough anymore, and they burn on a 24-hour cycle. I read that Trump, angry and uneducated in climate science or even weather and wind, would impose 50% tariffs on Canada as punishment.

Then I read that Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who is taking other steps to combat the tariffs, said that when we have wildfires, or devastating hurricanes, or other natural disasters, Canada would still be there to help. “That’s what neighbors do,” he said. “You don’t get on and start threatening and criticizing because guess what? One day it’s going to be your turn, and we’re going to be down there without hesitation to support our neighbors.”

Neighbors who want to help out, to build up instead of tear down, are still here. Yes, there is so much to be angry about. There is so much we’re going to have to fight: AI and data centers; hunger and poverty; the new, giant ICE detention center they are building near the North Carolina-Virginia border. This is before hurricane season really kicks up on the East Coast. It’s overwhelming.

So it helps to check with the functional community spaces, whatever that means to you: for me this week that will be the girls’ camp community, Clapping Hands Farm, where I get to help out with aftercare while the older siblings (junior camp counselors) have their afternoon meetings.

I am going to look for a simple project to adapt from this book:

Which I bought at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art! Which is still open, free, and a good place to think about where we’ve come from and where we are going.

Lots of love to you, Frog Troublers! What is giving you a feeling of community these days?

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P.S. Please read this wonderful post from Tift, “Dear Bonnie Raitt,” about the inspiration behind a free concert series she is organizing in Durham this September. Can’t wait!

Hi there, Frog Troublers. We are coming to you this morning with a simple request we hope you will please heed. It costs nothing and takes 10 minutes, tops!

Are you:

-A scientist or researcher?

-Someone who wants to be a scientist or researcher?

-Someone whose life has been helped by scientific research?

-Someone worried about climate change or trying to recover after natural disasters like Helene or Chantal?

-Someone who pays taxes and wants them to go to useful things that make life better?

Basically, if you live in America and benefit from our university system, medical research, the arts, humanities, or any kind of government-funded research, your voice matters here.

In May, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget released a blueprint for a new set of rules governing federal funding. Usually, funding is decided by teams of experts in their fields in a process called peer review. Peer review is generally fair and nonpartisan, based on the strength of the proposed work and how likely it is to make a positive, useful contribution. When I applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant in prose, for example, I applied using work published in my first book, Mattaponi Queen, a collection of stories about the rural Virginia community where I grew up. The $25,000 grant I received (in 2012) helped fund the writing of work that became The Art of Waiting, my next book, which among other things helped thousands of people struggling with infertility feel less alone. No one reviewing my application knew me personally, and my writing was reviewed based on its quality and anticipated impact. Many of your favorite writers and artists have likely been funded by NEA grants!

This proposed rule change would make it easier—and very likely—that Trump’s political appointees, not field-specific experts, will decide what research, what work, is worthy of our tax dollars. It is especially harmful for scientific and medical research, including research done at universities, which depend on federal funding. It will harm communities’ abilities to build climate resilience, it will interrupt clinical research including clinical trials currently saving lives, and it will force scientists, researchers, and professors to consider taking their life-saving teaching and research to other countries. This is already happening because of unnecessary funding cuts and cancelled grants that began in 2025, but this proposed rule will accelerate the process greatly. So if your kid or grandkid (like Bea) always wanted to go to NC State to study marine biology or plant biology, guess what? She may have fewer opportunities.

Until tomorrow at midnight, the OMB has to take comments from anyone who feels they will be affected by these rule changes. AND they have to respond! The nonpartisan group Stand Up for Science set a goal when the of collecting 10,000 comments and guess what? As of last night there were 287,884 comments posted!

Could we get to 300,000 or even more by Monday night? That would not only send a powerful message, it would create an important backlog of work for the OMB, which must respond to unique individual comments.

Let us show you how to make a unique, independent comment. Let your kids do it too! They have even more to lose than older folks, after all.

You can read around the published comments here (many are really interesting and poignant), but don’t copy and paste (some of the pro-OMB rule comments appear to be doing that; comments must be unique to be counted). NC-specific talking points

Here is how I structured my comment, if it helps:

I am a (list your primary identification here—mom, doctor, widow, student, cancer survivor, Helene survivor, etc.). I am also (list a secondary identification you’d like to mention here).

I am strongly opposed to the new OMB rule because (give your reason—it could be personal/medical, related to work, or related to federal grant-funded work your community).

In addition (give another reason here).

It helps to cite the part of the rule that most concerns you. You can read more about the rules here, but 200.300 is a good catchall rule to cite:

Rule §200.300 -- DEI and Related Prohibitions -- allows political appointees from the presidential administration (current or future) to cancel grants it disagrees with for any reason. That means it will be easier for political appointees to (give the thing you are most worried being cancelled or unfunded).

It will also (make the United States and our universities less desirable places for scientists to do research, teach, and mentor students, or something like that)

I urge you to reject this harmful/disastrous/destructive proposed OMB rule.

You can leave the comment anonymously, but remember that commenting on rules that govern the spending of our tax dollars is our right! (And some might say, our responsibility!). There is a box to tick that says you are commenting as an individual.

Comment here or through Stand Up for Science before Monday, July 13 at midnight.

Let us know if you left a comment and Bea and I will send you an audiobook of your choosing (while supplies last). If you can’t choose, tell us what you like to listen to and we’ll be glad to make a suggestion from our vast repertoire of well-narrated beloved books (some of them probably supported by NEA grants!)

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Have a great Sunday! Lots of love from us.

Have you ever hiked Max Patch, the wildflower-strewn bald mountain on the North Carolina/Tennessee border & along the Appalachian Trail?

It’s an easy hike, less than a mile loop and not very strenuous! But also gorgeous, amazing, a place to fly kites, enjoy picnics, read books, take photos, and pretend to be Maria Von Trapp.

Our friends Elaine, Dov, Avi, and Sam have a homestead very near Max Patch and they will pack you the most wonderful homegrown picnic, complete with a healthy meal, incredible dessert, a blanket, watercolors, and paper. They grow and locally source all the food in their terraced gardens, which you will also get to tour.

Dov and Avi are brothers and vegan chefs—Avi is also a firefighter—and Elaine is a poet and dearest friend for more than half my life now. Sam (Dov and Avi’s dad) is a sweet, quiet mystic who loves languages and culture. They hosted us for an incredible day and night of eating the best food, grown by them in their gardens; hiking; counting fireflies; and drinking seltzer on their porch (which looks east to the sunrise).

At one point, not long into the trip, Harriet cornered me in my wicker lounge chair. “I want to move to the mountains,” she said, looking into my eyes. “No, I am serious.”

Not possible for now but we will be back! You can go too.

Dov, Avi, and Elaine are building tiny, perfect writing cabins so eventually you can stay on their mountainside.

But in the meantime! You should treat yourself to a hike and a picnic and maybe some dog smiles.

The Downstay also performs a neat trick: it will open your heart to the joys of your own (maybe less elevated) life. You will see, with new eyes, a kitten meeting a box turtle in your front yard; a special walk in your neighborhood; a writing corner; an open space for gardening (whatever that means to you).

Up, kite, up!

P.S. Tift Merritt’s Sugar is out, and it is on repeat in our house.

How about you, Frog Troublers? Any good journeys, recipes, hikes, listens to recommend to us and our friends?

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I think a lot of FTT readers are in the same place I am, the place of remembering our fathers and grandfathers rather than bringing them cards or ties or T-shirts.

I miss my dad very much, but I can still hear his voice.

Sometimes I’ll ask my writing students to brainstorm some of the daily language they grew up around, especially the sayings, and then we collect them on the board. We especially love dad sayings, so I was thinking, if you like, you could share the sayings you heard so many times, but wish you could hear again.

From my dad:

(When asked where so-and-so is): Not my day to watch him.

(When someone expresses an “if only”: If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its butt. (The end is traditionally “a-hoppin’,” but my dad always left that off.)

Any songs? For my grandfather Haynes (Papa), “Froggy Went a-Courtin’”

For grandfather Boggs (Grandpa), Hank Williams’s “Hey Good Lookin’”

How about you?

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Lots to catch up on in a longer post next weekend: we are going to Cherokee! To see “Unto These Hills,” which tells the story of the Eastern Cherokee people from first contact with Europeans through the years of resistance leading to and after the Trail of Tears. And to visit some friends and see the newest bus chargers. Then we are going to hike Max Patch with Elaine and Dov.

If you’d like to read about how the Eastern Band of Cherokee have preserved air quality and student health by investing in electric school buses, you can click here for my latest in Ecotone (limited time free access). Please also check out Catcuce Tiger’s “I am from this place,” a beautiful essay about his motivation for caring for the environment. (Catcuce was twelve when he wrote this essay!)

Also, I hope to see some of you next Saturday at McIntyre’s (2pm) for a talk about The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw with Sylvester Allen, Jr.

Lots of love to all of you.

Tift, as you may know, is an amazing person. Mom to 10-year-old Jean, Practitioner-In-Residence at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute, writer, songwriter, scholar, organizer, teacher-of-songwriting and artist-who-tours (sometimes). Authentic beauty who makes everything around her more beautiful and authentic. Restorer of The Gables, a 1928 motel and boarding house that will soon reopen as a boutique hotel in Raleigh.

The Gables is gonna be gorgeous, but it took a special person like Tift to see its promise—this old brick building was seriously decaying and had been broken into many times over the years. The road sign was rusting and its lot was overgrown with weeds.

In early January, Tift invited a group of us to record the final chorus on “Everyday Singing,” a song inspired by the friendship between Rosetta Reitz, a feminist music scholar and record label owner, and Dachine Rainer, a writer and anarchist. In the 1960s, Rosetta lived in New York City, and Dachine lived in London. They exchanged letters about their lives—struggling, organizing, succeeding, raising daughters, getting divorced. Tift found their letters, and she thought about all the women she knew in her life, doing the same kind of hard work in this extraordinary time. She wrote about it in her Substack, Nightcap (subscribe to get early access to songs!):

When I found their words, I found myself in them. I found my friends. I found our present inside their past.

That’s what this song is about. Everyday resilience. Lasting friendship. The work that women do that so rarely gets named out loud, the scientific research, the creative labor, the caregiving, the mothering, the long quiet endurance of just keeping things going. The mark of women’s hands on everything around us that we somehow still forget to celebrate.

I wanted to make something that held all of that. And for the last chorus, I asked women I love and who have lost their research funding under the current administration to come sing it with me, loudly, together. I hope you’ll feel that when you hear it.

That was a hard time, early January. So many more months and years of Trumpism to struggle through. Hundreds of jobs lost at Duke, and the thousands of UNC system faculty told that our syllabi were now all public record, which in this environment put our classes and careers (maybe our lives) at risk. Thousands of important research grants, many of them led by women scientists and scholars, cancelled by 20-something DOGE boys using AI.

But Tift said “Let’s get together and sing.” Some of us said, “We can’t sing.” Tift said, “Of course you can sing.”

She invited us into the under-construction lobby of The Gables and taught us the words:

Whatever comes next there always will be

Poets and revolutionaries

People who risk their own for another

The everyday singing of mothers and daughters

I hear the everyday singing

I hear the everyday singing

I hear the everyday singing

It goes

May Love write the story between us

May Love fill the space that remains

May Love enter here on my signing

May Love leave no blank page

Here we are after recording (photo from Tift’s Substack):

Here is the song and video:

May love leave no blank page, friends. Whatever comes next.

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P.S. The Office of Management and Budget has published proposed new rules that will put all federal grants under review and potential cancellation by political appointees of the president, endangering the work of nearly every scientist and researcher in the country. The journal Science calls it a “red alert.” To oppose rule changes that politicize your research (or scientific research more broadly), please submit a comment at this link. Substantial comments are allowed until July 13th. The administration MUST reply to every substantial comment.

And, if you want to know more about how the targeted termination of scientific grants has affected minoritised researchers and the communities they study, please read this devastating Lancet article coauthored my friend and fellow AAUP organizer Abbey Hatcher.

And friends in the Triangle—Sylvester and I will be at McIntyre’s Books on June 27 at 2pm to talk about The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw. Please join us and spread the word!

To celebrate the end of end-of-grade testing, we had a plan on Friday to go with some friends. The weather was perfect, mid-80s, and I had our bags all packed with swimsuits and towels and goggles, and plans to pick up the girls at the bus stop, and Bea’s friend from her house. But at the bus stop I double-checked—the pool isn’t open this year on Fridays before school lets out. Bummer.

We decided to go to S&T’s for Coke floats and fried pickles, then rafting in the river. We carried our two big rafts down Chicken Bridge Road, then up the gravel drive to the private path that leads to the river. We saw another hatched-out turtle nest, and Harriet spotted two river otters, which followed us as we drifted along. Bea and her friend floated on one raft, Harriet and I on the other. The water was shallow but cool and clear, and we bumped along the riffles and currents until we made it to the small beach by Chicken Bridge.

The next day was also perfect—sunny, mid-80s. The girls and I went to the Climate Solutions Fair at The Plant, and after making sunprints and meeting some ravens and talking with people at different booths, I texted with our friends: river? or pool? I decided to leave it up to Bea and her friend who’d floated on the Haw River yesterday.

Everyone chose river.

Back home, we changed into swimsuits and topped off our rafts. The girls wanted towels and I wanted to read at the end, so we stuffed our things into our car and my friend Claire’s car and parked by the bridge. There were tadpoles in an almost-dried-up puddle, so we rescued them, then carried the rafts again down the gravel road in Indian Orchard.

Immediately on arriving at the riverbank, a majestic bald eagle flew overhead. Then we all saw a river otter frolicking in a shallow, rocky current and onto the banks of the narrow, forested island that sits across from the easement. We knew we’d made the best choice.

Or had we? I suggested (I am always suggesting things like this), what if we hike upstream, and go on the other side of the island where the river otters lived—maybe we could sneak up on them and get a better view? Claire looked around at our party and said, “I don’t think we’re sneaking up on anything today.” Bea liked the idea and led us down the weedy, overgrown path.

We had to put in before we got to the end of the island, then drag our rafts upstream. Claire kept falling: she hadn’t counted on a big hike, and it turned out she was wearing Rothy’s. The two rafts weren’t quite enough for all six of us (though Harriet surfed on the big one), and there was a lot of stumbling and scraping before we got to water deep enough to float or swim. Some of us may have cried because we were hungry and scraped up. We did not see the otters again.

Sometimes you do pool, and sometimes you do river. I like the river, especially putting in at one spot and winding up at another, because it’s a challenge, and emerging at the end feels like (is) an accomplishment. My goal is to keep the girls, as long as possible, sometimes opting for the rocky Haw even when they have the choice of easy swims and KitKat cones at the pool. As Bea said to her friend, “there’s no adult swim at the river.”

How are you spending your weekend, Frog Troublers? I hope you can take a moment to sign and share this petition asking telling the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees to reverse their embarrassing and harmful decision not to hire Dr. Kiran Asher as Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. Professor Asher, a woman of color whose research centers on feminism and social justice, was chosen by the Women’s and Gender Studies faculty and leadership, approved by the provost, but then rejected by UNC’s politically-appointed Board of Trustees. This is not the first time the Board has violated faculty governance and broken their own university rules—they did this back in 2021 with Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, and last year with 33 of their own faculty members awaiting tenure. In both cases public outcry led to a reversal of their bad decisions.

As Dr. Asher said in an interview with WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson, “If the BOT did this once, they could do it again. [W]hat if they decide they're going to deny tenure to other folks who do social justice related work?”

So far, the petition has 291 signatures—we want to collect at least 1,000 before we deliver it to the Board. It is for every member of the UNC community—that means any faculty, staff, student, alumni, and community members who care about a strong public university system in North Carolina.

sign & share the petition

What’s your weekend like? Pool, river, something else? Looks like another beautiful day. Lots of love from us.

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“Okay then, you do it,” my dad said. I don’t know what happened, but I am certain that my dad’s artist friend did not install his own minisplits.

In my own life I’m never embarrassed to seek out experts, and to hire them when I can afford it. Right now I’m in the middle of a shade garden project with Deena Class of Word and Plant, a local business that offers workshops, classes, pop-up shops, and garden design that is centered on healing plants, useful plants (think fabric dyes and food forests), and especially plants that are native to our community.

Deena, an experienced botanist and herbalist, is designing and helping me to source and plant garden beds surrounding our house. Our yard is really shady, steep, and frequently browsed by deer, and for a long time my chief method of landscaping was just buying ferns and plopping them in the ground. They did okay (especially where the roofline drips onto them), and then a few years ago, Deena started hosting native plant sales to raise money for our school’s PTA. I hung around the plant sale every spring and fall, asking questions, and bought whatever Deena suggested (unlike plants from other sources, hers thrived).

But I didn’t have a plan. Because I didn’t know what I was doing—I lack the years (and years) of experience and plant biology classes that Deena has under her belt. Before meeting Deena, all I would do was look at the plant’s tag and see if it said “shade” or “part shade,” and I would buy those. Deena has taught me, instead, to think about the seasons of our yard—some plants will flower in the early-spring, pre-forest-canopy sun, then enjoy the dappled light of later spring and summer. She’s also helping me understand how to plant around our trees, how to use plants to minimize erosion, and how to build little terraces to slow down water for better rooting.

We began installing the garden on May 26, and most of the plants have new leaves already. I love being in the yard with my plants and learning new things from Deena, like adding blood meal to the soil around Joe Pye weed that the deer were browsing or adding soluble kelp to the soil beneath a transplanted oak leaf hydrangea.

*

These days, people are often mistrustful of experts, think they need to be the experts in everything (exhausting/impossible), or (maybe this is worst of all) believe that their natural “good sense” proves that expertise is unnecessary, burdensome, or suspect.

Case in point: higher education, where I have both good news and bad news.

The good news is that colleges and universities are full of experts: in our classrooms, in our libraries, in our research labs. The system we have for training these folks, not to mention the exhaustive process we use for hiring faculty and other researchers, ensures that educators and other knowledge workers are generally top-notch.

The process of hiring a professor, for example, usually takes about a year. In the spring a committee will decide on a job description, then get that approved by a whole department and by higher-ups. In late summer or early fall, the job will post to a large national (sometimes international) network of websites and publications. Then the applications roll in. In most fields, it’s not uncommon to get more than one hundred qualified applicants for a single job.

A committee reviews these applications, decides on the best, and then invites an initial round of 10-15 for Zoom interviews, which take place late in the fall semester. After that, the committee narrows the field to three or four. Those four get invited for campus visits, usually in January or February, where they endure several rounds of interviews, give a job talk open to the campus community, meet with students, and go to dinners, lunches, and coffees with their potential colleagues.

Hiring faculty is intensive, like a marathon; becoming tenured as a faculty member is more like a triathlon (maybe an ultra-triathlon). Every tenure case involves hundreds of pages of materials, including student evaluations, peer evaluations, published work, and five or six reviews of the full dossier by faculty at peer institutions. It is then reviewed by a committee, by the department, by the dean, by the provost, by the chancellor—all people highly trained in their own fields, but deeply aware that their expertise will not match most of the work that has been done by departments and outside reviewers within the tenure case’s field of expertise.

Then the case goes to decided non-experts: a board of trustees who are meant to serve as protectors of the university and its interests. They are often alumni, retirees, doctors, attorneys, or business owners, and their role is largely advisory, fiduciary, and protective. They are not meant to override the decisions of experts, especially faculty, who are the most knowledgeable people on campus about their respective fields.

So, here’s the bad news, which you already know: our current Republican leadership, top to bottom, has weaponized suspicion of expertise to install non-experts in decision-making roles everywhere you might want, say, an expert. This is how we got a penile implant specialist as the leader of our hantavirus response. And a wrestling CEO as Education Secretary. And a podcaster as FBI director.

Unfortunately, our university boards of trustees are primarily politically appointed by our Republican legislature. One of the ways the legislature disempowered Governor Roy Cooper (and subsequently Josh Stein) is by removing the governor’s say in these appointments, so there is nothing to balance out highly partisan picks.

At UNC Chapel Hill, the board of trustees includes some lawyers, an anesthesiologist, real estate developers, a sports gambling executive, and CEOs of both a ceiling and wall installation company and Domino’s Pizza. No shade to any of those professions! I would have no idea how to mass-produce and market pizza, and I don’t know how to hang drywall either. But these guys (only two voting members of the current fifteen are women) are not staying in their lanes. They are swerving instead into lanes traditionally and properly managed by faculty experts, and they are doing the whole university and all of its alumni a grave disservice.

In 2021, this meant the board’s refusal to hire Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones with tenure (common for advanced hires like hers), a decision so unpopular and nationally embarrassing that it was later reversed (see below).

Last year, the board delayed tenure votes for 33 existing faculty members, who were left to agonize over their professional futures for weeks while the board tested the waters for getting rid of tenure entirely (the vote to approve finally came through on June 4). In both cases, faculty, student, and alumni pressure caused the board to back off, but not after significant damage to the institution’s reputation—something the board is meant to protect.

This spring, the new cohort of 25 UNC faculty members awaiting tenure agonized over delays in the board of trustees’ regularly scheduled meetings: was this a repeat of last year? I’m happy to report that UNC’s board voted last Wednesday to approve the faculty members.

But shortly after we cheered for that good news, we learned that the board—again, politically appointed, non-academics—had denied the hiring-with-tenure of another faculty member, who went through every hiring and approval process that belongs to faculty and departments. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones, this faculty member is a woman, a person of color, and a researcher in a field outside of the board members’ experience or knowledge.

Most people get that expertise matters! This is why you don’t hire a carpenter when you need a plumber, or a lawyer when you need a brain surgeon. As my former dean said to me when I joined my first search committee for a new faculty member, “this is the most important work we do.” That’s why it is so step-by-step, so time-consuming, so (frankly) exhausting—but also why it is joyful. This is a person who will teach and inspire hundreds, maybe thousands of our our students, whose research will elevate the mission of the university, whose expertise will deepen our ability to serve the public good.

To have that work undone by people who have no connection to or knowledge of the field is maddening (this year it’s a Women’s and Gender Studies professor—could not be more on the nose for non-expertise). And it’s unacceptable, whether you’re an alumnus, a student, faculty, or a member of the community who simply depends on the research and quality of life enhancements provided by universities like UNC-Chapel Hill.

I wish—as always—that I could show my dad the shade garden I’m working on with Deena (he designed the addition to our house, after all), or talk to him about all the ridiculous stuff happening in this world. He was a true expert in many things, but he also had the good sense and humility to respect the expertise of others, from HVAC installers to sculptors to college professors like me. My dad would have been 75 on Wednesday, May 20. We need more people like him in this world.

How do you find the experts in your life, Frog Troublers? What are you an expert in?

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P.S. for locals: Want to learn flower pressing from Deena and learn to make something new? Sign up for her Make ‘n’ Take Botanical Book Press workshop on Sunday, May 31 in Durham. I’m planning to go and would love to see you!

And… stay tuned, Tarheels and the Tarheel-adjacent, for more on the most recent tenure case and how you can help. AAUP NC is on it!

Greetings and Happy Mother’s Day, Frog Troublers! Would you like to hear about the worst thing I’ve done in my 12 1/2 years of being a mom?

Of course you do! Other people’s mistakes are interesting, plus finding out what other people consider “really bad” can be illuminating about our own worst things. If you think you’re going to hear about me returning library books late (I always do that) or missing teacher appreciation week (that was last week, but we’re gonna pretend it’s this week), you are wrong wrong wrong.

If this were a normal and sensible publication instead of a thing I think about all week, wake up early every Sunday to work on, and then promptly abandon all promotion for, I would tease the reveal then make this for paid subscribers only. Or something like that. So I will simply say:

Okay, here goes. I told one friend about this when it happened, and she was… shocked into silence. This person is not a judgmental scold (I am not friends with people like that) but a woman who literally could not believe what I am about to tell you.

It starts kind of sweet. It was December, a chilly but not super-cold day, and I was done with school for the semester. I decided to meet the girls at the bottom of the driveway so we could go book-shopping at McIntyre’s Books. I had baked some chocolate banana bread and had two slices wrapped in paper towels.

Ms. Peele’s bus pulled up at 3:55, as usual. Ms. Peele waved, Harriet bounded off the bus, and Bea trudged down the steps with the weight of middle school on her: trumpet case, heavy backpack, binder of homework that doesn’t fit into the backpack. Once off the bus she handed the trumpet to Harriet, who came over to my window and said what she always says when I meet them with the car: “I didn’t know you’d be here!” Bea sank, relieved, into the front seat, and Harriet loaded the trumpet into the back seat.

I’d been texting my brother while I waited. I finished the last text (we were fighting! Not a good thing to do on text!) greeted the girls, stashed my phone, and pulled out onto Chicken Bridge Road. Bea told me about her day, and once we were on River Road I remembered the banana bread, which was stashed in the front console. “Ooh, chocolate,” Bea said as I handed her a slice (she likes banana only when chocolate is involved). I took Harriet’s slice, wrapped in its gooey paper towel, and held it back to her. She didn’t take it, so I said, “Harriet, take the bread!”

Bea turned around. “Harriet’s not there!” she gasped.

I looked in the rearview and confirmed: empty. Harriet had put the trumpet on the seat, closed the door, and then I’d driven away thinking she was inside. The next three minutes were some of the most heart-poundingly frightening I can remember. We were not even on our road. We were nearly two miles away, readers. I screeched the car around and raced down River Road, rumbled down Medina Lane, swung left onto Chicken Bridge. Somehow I thought Harriet would still be standing there, waiting as if for the bus, but the driveway was empty. We made it up the driveway, parked, and flew into the house.

There was Harriet, coat off, backpack hung on its hook. I scooped her up, weak with relief. She looked… fine? Not even tear-stained? I told her how sorry I was and asked her what she did when I drove away. “I waved my coat, then I turned around and walked up the driveway. I was gonna go to Jaimee and Josh’s.”

“You didn’t cry?”

“Oh, I cried at first. But then I stopped.”

We didn’t make it to the bookstore that day. We ate some banana bread. I don’t remember what else we did, but Harriet was okay.

My lessons: kids are resilient, good neighbors are the best, and it’s normal to make mistakes as a mom. Moms do a lot, mostly way too much in fact.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still shudder when I think of the empty back seat!

One of my bigger fears is that I will neglect one daughter for the other, or not be the same mom I am to Harriet that I was to Bea when she was the same age. I am so much older, and life in our country is so much harder.

When I feel that way I remember that life is lived day by day, and there are seasons for everything. Last night, Bea went to a play with some friends and Harriet and I decided to get a cheese-and-spinach pizza (Capp’s is our favorite) and some lemonade. We took it to the river, where we saw:

Black and yellow swallowtail butterflies

Bald eagles

Canada geese

A great blue heron

and…

Harriet discovered a turtle nest, dug out of the clay soil, the turtles all hatched and gone! It was right next to the river, the leathery white shells all curled into what looked from a distance like litter:

Think of those babies—Eastern river cooters? Yellow-bellied sliders? Snappers?—cutting the shell with their egg teeth, then slipping down the banks into the water, which our neighbor David remembers once running all the colors of the dumped textile dyes but now runs, most days, clean enough the see the bottom.

Resilience!

We are resilient, too, Frog Troublers, and we will get through this time, by which I mean the ridiculous Virginia decision that just confirmed that we are playing by two different sets of rules. Thank you to Mamie and her friends, who canvassed every weekend for months because they love all the things Republicans hate: healthcare for all, good public education, clean water and air, reproductive freedom, and a helping hand to moms and kids who need it, which is basically all the moms, all the kids.

How are you spending Mother’s Day? We are headed to a Bulls game with our friends. The baby wrens fledged yesterday. Harriet and I are thinking of doing a weekly river picnic if you ever want to join.

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Lots of love from us!

Harriet invited six girls, and five were able to make it. They rode Ms. Peele’s bus, a first school bus ride for one of them! I raced home from school and met them with a giant pink 8 balloon:

Harriet introduced them to Ollie, and I set out oranges, strawberries, chips, and a box of Capri Suns. They treated the box like an open bar, which cracked me up.

We’ve been working on native plant beds in the yard, and Harriet showed the girls where she’s been making fairy houses and gardens around the rock beds. On the picnic table, the girls chose from a variety of materials to get started with making the houses:

-Shells collected from Venice Beach

-Pink quartz Mamie bought in Venice Beach

-Tiny terracotta planters

-Tiny “paintings” Harriet and I made from old magazines and watercolor paper

-Fabric squares, tape, scissors, and a hole punch

Then Harriet showed them how to collect “things from nature”: acorn tops, pine cones, leaves, and stones. I grabbed some herbs, wildflowers, and dogfennel from up the hill, put on a Fairycore playlist I found on Spotify, and they got started:

We also had cake (this one) and strawberry ice cream, and played a game of Beckon (like hide and seek but you can be “beckoned” out of jail).

But in the middle of the party something really cool happened. I’ll let Harriet tell you about it:

Guess what? The birds that were in my bike helmet hatched on my birthday! The eggs were gone!

At my birthday party, I sang happy birthday to the birds. Hazel, my friend, said they were cute but also gross because they didn’t have fuzz or feathers yet.

Give me a request about bird names, please. There are five birds. They all look like twins, and now they are so fuzzy and cute. They mostly sleep in a pile unless their mom is there. Then they sit up and cheep tiny cheeps. Today they are five days old. (REALLY, I NEED SOME BIRD NAMES. In my life I have a lot of stuffies to name.) Love, Harriet (and Ollie who is not allowed near the birds).

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Do you ever read those “36 hours in [some faraway locale]” travel stories and think, “who goes to ___ for 36 hours?” Well, Frog Troublers, we were those glamorous fools this week, traveling to Venice Beach, California for just two nights to see the girls’ Aunt Joy, Uncle Jason, and baby cousin Lucy and to travel for bus-book research and my MFA program’s 60^th anniversary. It was very moving to see my friends and teachers—all five graduates from my year (2002!) came back for the reunion.

We had an awesome time but are jetlagged (still kind of recovering from our first jet lag?) and getting ready for Harriet’s 8^th birthday party on Tuesday. We have a fun plan for making fairy houses in the garden with some of Harriet’s buddies and will tell you all about how it turns out.

Now that it has finally rained some Mamie and I are planting native plants in the garden beds, following designs and instructions from the brilliant Deena Class at Word and Plant. Oh, and we’ll also tell you about May Day in Raleigh—lots of Chatham folks are going to the General Assembly to insist they put KIDS OVER CORPORATIONS and fully fund our schools (plus, pass a budget!).

In the meantime, do you have plans for May Day, International Workers’ Day? Thanks to the power of collective action, many local school districts were forced to close so that teachers and families can travel to Raleigh to make our voices heard. Chatham County, in fact, was the first district to close after 20% of our teachers submitted personal days for May 1.

The rally at North Carolina’s State Capitol starts at 11:00am. If you want to march with me and AAUP, you can be at the NC State Belltower at 9. Hope to see so many friends there!

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Lots of love from us.

Do you watch The Pitt? Each season is a real-time account of fifteen hours at a busy emergency room in Pittsburgh. It’s pretty bloody—Bea and I had to overcome a certain amount of squeamishness (the very first trauma in season one makes an intern pass out), but the pacing, realism, and amazing cast hooked us.

Season two, which takes place on the fourth of July, felt “a little boring,” according to Bea, who’d enjoyed the longer through-line mysteries of season one. “It was mostly people with really gory injuries, like the lady with her leg chopped off or an old guy whose hand got degloved playing tug of war. A lot of the plot revolved around Dr. Robbie and his suicidal motorcycle trip. He kept snapping at the other doctors and interns, and he even fought with Dana. I just felt like his character wasn’t as compelling this season.”

But a single short scene—which had nothing to do with gory injuries and everything to do with the cumulative pressure of dealing with violence, antivaxxers, healthcare cuts that nearly killed several patients (and did kill one), and ICE—resolved the whole season for us.

At 9:00 pm, many from the day shift head to the hospital’s rooftop to decompress and watch the fireworks. Among the assembled workers only one doctor, the idealistic Dr. Mohan, smiles at the display—everyone else looks stunned, pained, or in the case of Perlah (above), who has spent almost every free moment searching for her ICE-detained colleague (he was trying to protect a patient), wrecked with grief. For a brief moment the camera pans to the fireworks, and they light up the skyline with aimless wreckage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better representation of the bummer feeling of watching a display that is supposed to be inspiring and beautiful, but in reality evokes at best bluster and maybe getting your hand blown off, at worst American imperialism and war. The scene brings to mind a gentle, widowed alcoholic named Louie who loved fireworks but died earlier in the shift. But for Perlah and Dana, it’s also very clearly about ICE kidnappings and understaffed hospitals and rape kits that don’t get picked up by the police.

Bea and I talk about The Pitt on Friday mornings on the way to school, and I asked her this week if she thought all the episodic saves, close calls, and emergency maneuvers were worth it, just to get to that one scene.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “It was worth it.”

Another interesting thing about The Pitt is that it takes place in either the very-near future or the very recent past. This July 4 is not last year, but July 4, 2026—a time when ICE officers will probably still be terrorizing our cities and communities and people may still be losing healthcare. Next season is supposed to take place around Thanksgiving. It’ll be filmed this summer, and will air in early 2027.

We’ll know, by Thanksgiving, a lot about where our country is headed—further into fascism and autocracy, or—let’s hope—toward peace, justice, and accountability.

But we don’t have to just hope. We can show up.

Virginians, take someone to the polls on Tuesday and vote YES on redistricting.

North Carolinians, you can make plans for May Day. Many school districts, including our own, are closed this May 1 so that our brave teachers can take to the streets to demand that our state prioritize Kids Over Corporations, Workers Over Billionaires. All of us who teach for the state have been working without a raise or a budget for more than a year. Deep, unnecessary funding cuts are making our jobs untenable.

But shows like The Pitt, for me, beautifully demonstrate what it means to keep showing up. All these folks will be there for the next shift:

My union and I are marching from NC State’s Belltower (meeting at 9) to the General Assembly (convening at 10), where we’ll hear from teachers and other allied workers across the state. Richard and his union, CCAE, will be there too, and so will Bea and Harriet.

Are you going to a May Day event near you? Will we see you in Raleigh? Let us know (in the comments) if you need more information!

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Lots of love from us.

There is a bird’s nest in my bike helmet! It has five eggs in it. The eggs are pink with red spots. The nest has pine needles, leaves, twigs, moss, and pollen. It is fun to see the eggs. It is also so exciting to think that the baby birds inside will hatch and grow up.

Daddy says they are probably Carolina wrens. These little birds nest in hanging baskets sometimes. My helmet was hanging on a hook outside our door, under the roof, so the nest stays dry.

We took it down before we knew that it was a nest, but we were careful to put it back where it was. We’re going to leave the nest alone so the mother feels safe.

Have you ever found a nest or baby animals? Where did you find them?

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In 1966, the artist Yoko Ono exhibited “Ceiling Painting” in London (image is above). To view the painting, the viewer climbed to the top of a white ladder. Waiting at the top was a magnifying glass, hung on a chain from a frame on the ceiling. Holding the magnifying glass and looking through the frame, the viewer would read the word “YES” in tiny block letters.

Lore has it that this is how John Lennon came to know Ono’s work. He was attracted to the positivity. Relieved, he later said.

In the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of reading and talking with Sylvester at a number of public events. We had a great conversation with Dr. Freddie Parker and the Orange County Remembrance Coalition, and with Andrew Artis, co-owner of Bound and Vine, a lovely and welcoming new wine bar and bookstore in Fayetteville where we met a diverse and passionate community of readers.

My new motto comes from Sylvester, who has been asked a few times about how we decided to work together, or how, having never written a book before, he decided to do it. Sylvester usually tells the story of protesting in Graham in 2020, meeting me through some of the reporting I was doing about that, and then inviting me to his play, The Spirit of Wyatt Outlaw. Soon after that, he says, I asked him to coffee and proposed writing the book.

Let me say yes before I say no, Sylvester remembers thinking.

I like the way that the motto is internal, something that is in conversation with the part of your self that may be scared, uncertain. Not that you say yes to everything. But there are enough places giving advice about how to say no.

Maybe a better question is how we say yes to the things that feel outside-our-experience, new, compelling. The big leaps.

Let me say yes before I say no.

On my way into Fayetteville I saw a small group of protesters holding hand-lettered cardboard signs at a tiny intersection of several busy roads. I didn’t get all the signs but one read “Stop the war.” I missed my turn I was so surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. Why shouldn’t people in a military town be opposed to unnecessary, unplanned wars of choice and devastation?

But they were not in a space that was easy to protest, physically or otherwise. Cars and trucks rolled by on every side. Probably some drivers yelled things. Positive and otherwise. The protesters knew that, going in. There were only five or six people: what can five or six people do? One of those protesters may have been asked by a friend to join and may have hesitated, but then they said yes.

This is how the 2020 protests in Graham started. Someone had an idea, and someone else said yes.

The next month is going to be extremely busy at the FTT HQ, because I have said yes to so many things: a teach in on Tuesday about workers’ rights, a trip to Southern California to celebrate my MFA program’s anniversary, a trip to Boston to read at Porter Square Books. My students are making a print journal of their students’ work, and we will have to find a way to print and distribute it. At home I’m working on a huge native plant garden with the help of my genius friend Deena at Word and Plant (more on that soon). I am looking forward to all of it.

Yes to more gardens, bigger than you think you can handle.

Yes to climbing.

Yes to trips to see old and new friends.

Yes to protests. Yes to read-ins in support of libraries.

Yes to opening book stores in military towns. And to going to read at them.

Yes to books. Yes to poetry!

My friend Elaine Bleakney will read at this event with Marianne Gingher next Saturday, April 11, in Durham. It’s free! You should come and get Elaine’s new book, Take the Exit then Exit! I bet she will sign it.

Also you should get a copy my friend and colleague Chelsea Krieg’s beautiful new poetry collection, Everything Is Water. Chelsea says I was the first person (!) to tell her that she writes eco poetry. Listen to her wonderful poem, “Before I knew what it meant,” written after a residency in Cape Charles, Virginia:

And here, finally, is our C-SPAN event, streamable! Lots more wisdom from Sylvester in there.

Happy Easter and love to you, Frog Troublers. What are you saying yes to lately?

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But first, the menu! I was inspired by Snap Pea Creative Dining, which catered the installation of historian Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley as president of the National Humanities Center. Dr. Kelley is the first woman and person of color to lead the NHC, and I was so honored to attend the day of engagement and celebration this Thursday. They had flowers from Fireside Farm:

We sat at long tables decorated with these beautiful blooms (hellebores make a great picked flower—Lisa of Fireside says to put their stems in boiling water to help them last). Dinner was served family style, and everything was local. Just picked carrots! Fresh-caught tile-fish! Red Russian kale! Wild mushroom gumbo! Crowder pea hummus! Paris-brest with pecan praline mousseline! Covington sweet potato churro with dark chocolate ganache! The chef spoke about each of the courses and where the ingredients came from.

I got to sit across from a bunch of heroes of mine, meet new people, and reconnect with some of the best folks who used to work at NC State, which was Blair’s academic home for many years. We heard a gorgeous, a cappella rendition of Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” (which morphed to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”) by a scholar and mentor of Blair’s, then Blair rose to deliver a powerful keynote. She spoke movingly about the terrifying moment we find ourselves in, but also about the strength and determination and solidarity she saw in the Black working class people, including her own forebears, whose history she studied for years as she wrote Black Folk. She talked about where we are and where we’ve been. We teared up. We stood and clapped.

And then we ate all of that food! Every morsel of it!

And so, on the occasion of seeing Mamie and Skipper for the first time since Christmas(!), I got inspired. Here is the menu I have decided on:

-fig-honey goat cheese and purple dead nettle toasts (see below)

-foraged salad (see below)

-picnic chicken

-deviled eggs with redbud capers

-spring seafood stew with peas and tarragon

-Vivian Howard’s orange chocolate beet cake with cream cheese walnut frosting

Bea’s Completely Foraged Salad (circa 2023!)

Yesterday was the first day of spring. It was also a day off from school. Harriet and Mommy and I decided to make a completely foraged salad… and it was really good!

First, we watched this video from NC State:

Next, we hunted around to find ingredients.

Here is what we found and how we prepared it:

• Purple dead nettle (we used this for something else, not the salad—keep reading to find out)

• Redbud blossoms

• Chickweed (look around streams or wet areas for this plant)

• Wood sorrel (don’t use more than a handful of this—it may taste good, but too much is not good for you).

• Violets

• Onion grass

• Dandelions (the blossoms and the small leaves)

• Spinach and mint from my indoor plants

First, while Harriet and I were washing and I was trimming the salad, Mommy made purple dead nettle toasts. We saw a post from Alexis Nicole (Black Forager) that it’s better cooked than raw. Purple dead nettle grows everywhere this time of year and looks like this:

To make the dead nettle toasts, Mommy microwaved a teaspoon of butter with some snipped onion grass in a small dish. She added chopped dead nettle and stirred it up, then added salt and lemon zest. She let this rest and made some toast in the toaster oven. She spread some goat cheese on the toast, then spooned the purple dead nettle mixture on top. Then she added a few redbud blossoms. Delicious!

Here’s how I made the salad:

First I separated the different washed ingredients. Then I layered it, one ingredient at a time, using a lot of chickweed which has a mild taste, like lettuce. I used kitchen scissors to cut the ingredients into smaller pieces. I added salt between each layer. I saved the redbud blossoms, violets, and wood sorrel for last. I use wood sorrel, which tastes sour like a really good pickle, for garnish.

Last we made a lemon vinaigrette dressing. Harriet whisked lemon juice, olive oil, and a tiny amount of honey in a teacup until it was smooth. Then we drizzled it on top of the salad and tossed it together.

Will you eat any foraged foods this spring? Definitely try some redbuds before they’re gone! They’re related to sweet peas. Harriet says they taste like a dream she once had but can’t remember. Love from us.

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“Look!” Harriet said, pointing at a flowering bush swarming with bees. “Pollinators.”

We were leaving her piano lesson, which she takes every Monday afternoon at Ms. Shelley’s house. It had been warm enough for me to sit outside during the lesson, reading my graduate student’s thesis, a brilliant and dense collection of speculative and science fiction stories. Harriet is still plink-plunking because I don’t make her practice enough from the book—she likes to make up her own songs—but piano lessons are a good in our life. Ms. Shelley, who lives near our favorite county park, has a cat named Lucy, a fragrant fruit tree orchard, and flocks of ducks and chickens whose eggs we buy every week.

In the car on the way home, Harriet told me more about pollinators. How bees and butterflies taste with their feet, how the bee collects nectar and how some of the pollen gets stuck to its thorax. When it goes to the same kind of flower and does that again and again, that’s how the flowers grow.

“We’re researching it in the library. But,” she said, her voice low and serious, “we are using AI.”

Harriet knows how I feel about AI in a general way, but like most students she has her own perceptions of its value.

“We go on the computer, and we talk to a farmer named Tom. Except he’s not always named Tom and he’s not really a farmer. He’s not really real at all.”

The student whose book I was reading in Ms. Shelley’s yard once told me, choosing among classes, that she didn’t want AI anywhere near her education. That sums up how I feel about my children’s education nicely, but does not account for the ways educators are being coerced, encouraged, and sometimes forced to use it. Sweet second graders! Using AI to study something in books and right outside their doors—AI which burns water and resources and money and forests. AI which destroys the very habitats of the creatures they are studying.

I was grateful to chaperone a field trip with Harriet’s class later in the week to the Museum of Life and Science. Before going into the butterfly house, her second grade class talked about insects and metamorphosis with a museum educator. They stroked a millipede with two fingers and peered through a digital microscope at butterfly wings. Inside the humid greenhouse, butterflies landed on kids from all over the Triangle. A museum volunteer swiped Harriet’s fingers with sugar water, and a Blue Morpha stepped from his fingers to hers.

“Its wing is torn,” Harriet noticed. “Will it be okay?”

“Oh yes,” the man answered. “It takes a lot more than that to kill it.”

Today we’re going to practice piano, prepare the garden, and plant some wildflower seeds we ordered from Sow True Seed. I’m also going to re-up our CSA subscription to In Good Heart Farm, the best farm share ever, with pickup locations in Cary, Raleigh, and Chatham County. In Good Heart Farm allows you to choose what goes into your weekly or biweekly box of veggies and fruit, and they send you a wonderful newsletter. We especially love their tomatoes, herbs, strawberries, herbs, lettuces, greens, peppers, radishes, beets, potatoes, and seedlings. They still have spots available for their spring season, which starts in just a month.

How about you, Frog Troublers? What does your Sunday look like? Have you noticed AI invading your school or workplace, and how are you experiencing it?

Lots of love from us.

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Look at those toe pads, gripping the stick!

Even though they spend a lot of time in water, chorus frogs are tree frogs. Spring peepers (also tree frogs) are closely related, but they make a higher sound and will emerge later, in a week or two. Here is what a chorus frog sounds like.

I asked Kevin how he got these amazing photos—we almost never successfully sneak up on a chorus frog, despite quite literally crossing their paths daily. Kevin told us his secret: look for ponds without much brush or vegetation to hide in, like retaining ponds around shopping centers.

Like many hibernating amphibians, chorus frogs can freeze solid during the coldest part of the winter, relying on glucose in their cells to keep their organs safe. They thaw out in early spring, but can be harmed if they thaw, then refreeze (a danger of climate change).

Two things you can do to help frogs: leave your leaves (good hiding spaces year-round or hibernaculum in winter) and avoid using pesticides and herbicides.

2. Virginia is finally voting on a special redistricting plan! President Obama endorsed the plan to gain four Dem seats, created in response to Republican-led redistricting in other states (including NC). "This amendment gives you the power to level the playing field in the midterms this fall," he told voters.

Mamie has been canvassing for the plan with the King William (!) Democrats, and she says there’s a lot of enthusiasm around fighting back. Districts like Mamie’s have been long represented by lazy, greedy Republicans who don’t care about health care, public schools, the environment, or even whether their constituents have internet connectivity. We say good riddance!

3. Speaking of fighting back, my AAUP colleagues, NC State’s Local UE-150, the Chair of the faculty and leaders of Student Government sent a second open letter to our chancellor, Kevin Howell, demanding the reinstatement of Jae Edwards, who was fired after a right-wing media org posted a heavily edited video online designed to show that Edwards was illegally doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Edwards

Aside from the fact that Trump’s executive order outlawing DEI has itself been ruled illegal, do you know what Edwards, who in 2025 won the Pride of the Wolfpack award, said in that video?

“I think it’s so important, more than ever, to still uplift and celebrate our students.”

You can sign the petition demanding Jae’s reinstatement here. Students, faculty, and community members are planning to rally for Jae on Wednesday, March 11 at 6pm in Talley Student Union:

4.. Sylvester and I have a new event on the books in Hillsborough, NC with Dr. Freddie Parker and the Orange County Remembrance Coalition. Local folks, we’d love to see you there:

(I think our CSPAN airing got moved because of Jesse Jackson’s service—will report back once we have a new air date!)

4. The girls and I started our garden seeds—a little later than we meant to, but we’re pretty sure they’ll catch up. This year we’re planting greens, cucumbers, herbs, peppers, peas, flowers, and of course lots of tomatoes. I like to plant things that are easy to grow and that we like to eat every day. (Bea was glad I forgot to order yellow squash seeds, but I’m going to rectify that mistake.)

5. We got a new (to us) car! An all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 5. So far we love it, but we’ll report back in more detail about the process of transitioning from a gas-powered hybrid to an electric.

How about your good news, Frog Troublers? These are dark times but you have to look and listen for the bright spots.

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On Monday, Bea and Harriet had fevers and stayed home from school. We quickly realized it was the dreaded strep throat, and Tuesday morning Dr. Barnes treated them both quickly and kindly. I talked to him about the measles outbreak in NC, an unnecessary nightmare that risks every baby’s life (children can only be vaccinated after they’re a year old). He said that we are all protected by our vaccines but that it was very, very concerning and has already created some different procedures in their clinic. (Bea and I realized that this is may be the plot trajectory of the abandoned-in-the-ER baby in The Pitt, our current favorite show.)

Tuesday evening, Sylvester and I talked about Wyatt Outlaw at Main Street Books in Davidson. Have you ever been? It’s a beautiful little bookstore with an awesome kids’ section and a healthy selection of art supplies (I picked up a calligraphy set for the girls and a travel watercolor set for a friend). We loved the staff, the warm and receptive crowd, and meeting up with OG Frog Troubler Bill Diskin.

On Wednesday I read and marked stories and took care of the girls, who felt well enough by the end of the day for a good walk to the river.

The girls finally went back to school Thursday, a morning of driving rain. I dropped them off as early as possible so I could get to Raleigh to deliver, with my AAUP colleagues, our petition about academic freedom before the UNC Board of Governors met that morning.

What happened next is kind of a blur: driving through a green light on 64, then red tail lights in front of me, stomping on the brakes, skidding tires and the sudden smash and face-punch of the air bag. Little birds and stars were circling my head as I reached for my phone, which was busy dialing 911 on my behalf.

Have you ever been in an accident where the air bag deployed? I had not, and was surprised by the bitter, noxious smell that filled my Prius. But, even though the front end of my car was completely smashed up, I unbuckled my seat belt and stepped out of the car onto the shoulder.

I was emotionally shaken, but physically fine.

“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed to driver in front of me, whose fender was busted.

“It’s okay,” she said, and embraced me. Frog Troublers, she was a doctor from our very practice!

I feel terrible that I hit another driver, but I am also so very grateful for airbags! And vaccines! And all the things that keep us safe. The police officer who protected the accident scene was also a woman, and when she saw the armload of books I was holding she asked, “are you a teacher?”

I told her I’m a professor at NC State, and you know what? She told me she is about to enter NC State’s master’s program in social work and is so excited to begin a new career.

My dear friend Claire picked me up, took me to her office, where I emailed my students and called our insurance company. All morning, I got updates and photos from my friends, who did the awesome work of delivering the petition, speaking to media, and planning next steps to push back against the unnecessary and harmful restrictions on speech, teaching, and research in our public universities:

That night I texted my friend Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway, a labor historian, with the story about the cop-turned-social work student. Ajamu called it “one of the most beautiful things” he’d ever heard. “She’s ready to do the real work now,” he said.

I thought about academic freedom, and how hard social work in particular has been hit by anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and legislation created by people who have no knowledge of or experience in the fields they seek to limit. I thought about how academic freedom is for all of us: doctors studying and developing vaccines, public health researchers studying vaccine uptake, creative writers teaching stories from around the world, social workers and police officers and every other professional encountering a diverse community that yes-of-course experiences racism and discrimination and yes-of-course needs the best-trained folks helping them.

Without academic freedom, would we even know why putting a frog in milk (a Russian and Finnish tradition from before refrigeration) keeps the milk from spoiling? Bea learned this gross factoid in a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! book this week, and we checked it out: the why of frogs in milk was confirmed by scientists who studied the peptides secreted from the skins of the Russian brown frogs that were traditionally dropped into milk jugs. Not merely an explanation for folklore, the research could lead to “the prevention of both pathogenic and antibiotic resistant bacterial strains,” the scientists concluded.

Academic freedom also helps to investigate and tell the stories of people like Wyatt Outlaw. Thursday was the 156th anniversary of his assassination.

“I never knew that anybody important and Black came from Alamance County,” Sylvester often says. “What would it have been like for me, as a kid, to know that a hero like Wyatt Outlaw walked the very ground under my feet?”

You can hear more March 7 on CSPAN2, which will broadcast our book launch from the AACAHC in Burlington:

More reading dates will be on the calendar soon. In the meantime, check out this story from Randolph County NC, about a community who showed up to a County Commissioner meeting for a silent read-in in support of the library and disbanded board of trustees and in opposition to book bans. Supporters of a challenged picture book, Call Me Max, about a transgender boy, outnumbered opponents 20-to-1.

They kept the challenged book on their shelves, but vigilance is so important. You can support your local libraries by requesting books you hear about (Call Me Max and The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw, for example) and joining a group like Public School Strong, PEN America, and the WDA to stay informed about protecting the right to read and learn in your community.

How was your week, Frog Troublers? Have you started planning for the next No Kings Protest on March 28?

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