HeyJaredMichael F James
Field Notes for Finite Time — A commonplace of memory, making, and unfinished threads.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 14, 2026
Latest issues
Letter to an Aging Poet (opens the original)
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I’m in the process of re-reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, one of those conveniently small books that fit easily in the hand or in a pocket, ready to provide reflective insights into the conditions and challenges of art and life from the artist’s standpoint. It occurred to me a day or two ago that what I really need to be reading are some artist’s “Letters to an Aging Poet,” though it’s easy to see why no one’s written them. The cumulative experience of aging tracks along the
Something Offbeat This Way Comes (opens the original)
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Excited by another writing project I’m focused on at the moment, I started this out announcing that I was going to take another brief hiatus from my every-other-week Substack posting. An hour later…well, there was apparently something simmering somewhere in my cerebral contours that decided it was ready to see the light of day. The mysteries of inspiration…When I write here, I want to do so because I feel I have something worth saying, not because another posting date is imminent. At this point
Faint Praise (opens the original)
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“Hmmm…interesting. You must have spent a lot of time working at this. Wow! So much stitching! Nice tone of blue there. That’s a lively pattern in that corner. Are you familiar with Joyce Kozloff’s work? I see you’ve got a couple more like this in progress—you’re so prolific!”Nearly forty years ago, a former workshop student and textile artist invited me to her studio to see her work. Wrapping things up, I eyed the clock and prepared to make my escape. She suddenly bushwhacked me with “You know,
The Unbidden Shadow of Disillusionment (opens the original)
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Like many fans of the Irish musician Glen Hansard’s work, news of his sudden death was a rude and unwanted intrusion at a moment when unwelcome news, national and international, had become a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. I’m still massaging the sadness it planted, one that has overridden an excess of negative emotions compounding over the summer. Instinct turned me to playlists of his music stored on my iPhone, and a few nights after the announcements I re-watched the film Once for probably
Minding the Gap (opens the original)
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