Priscilla's Website

Priscilla Long is a Seattle based poet, writer, editor, and a longtime independent teacher of writing. She writes science, poetry, history, creative nonfiction, and fiction. She is author of six books (to date), including the how-to-write manual The Writer’s Portable Mentor. Her work appears in numerous literary publications, both print and online, and her science column “Science Frictions” ran for 92 weeks online at the American Scholar. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Washington and serves as founding and consulting editor of HistoryLink.org , the free online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

Of her writing, the novelist Laura Kalpakian said, “She won’t be confined by forms. This is what made her recent Fire and Stone such a protean, exciting book. Yes, it’s a vivid memoir, but she also asks questions of The Past, not simply her own, but the larger anthropological past. Priscilla Long is the enemy of slack thinking, the lazy, the euphemistic. She has a Renaissance mind...”

Priscilla grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

[Excerpted from Bethany Reid, Long, Priscilla (b. 1943), HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington State history (https://www.historylink.org/File/20845)]

What I Did One Sunday Morning

After May Swenson

Got a thick book down off the shelf.
Settled into the windowseat to read.
Watched dust dance in a sunbeam.
Read a page of Bleak House.
Copied out the passage on page 5
that begins Fog everywhere. Counted
the number of times Dickens put
the word fog in that passage: 13.
Took a nap. Got up. Greased
the skillet. Made pancakes. Sipped
another mug of coffee. Put on
Kind of Blue. Tracked a squirrel
out the window, scampering up
the vine maple. With the sun, painted
the cedar tree 13 shades of green.

The Yellowwood Wood

After Allen Grossman

The poet spells yellow:
a yellowwood wood, a yellow-
wood bench to loaf upon. My poem
purloins his lines:  leonine death-
gold of Autumn. Of the great cats,
only cheetahs purr. In this yellow-
wood wood, truth dallies,
deliquescent. Luteus leaves
twirl down like birds. Death
will get its winter day.
Our yellowed pages stay.
Let the world go dun
and orange, or rot
in blots of blue, or burn.
I’ll loiter here.