Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

  • How To Write a “DARE” Letter

    So there are “kids, don’t do drugs” lectures, and then there are “kids, don’t do drugs” lectures (like Tolstoy’s “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves”–an absolute classic). I grew up Mormon, which meant that the Word of Wisdom (Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of LDS scripture) formed the bedrock of my attitude…

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  • #6: Choosing a Photographer & Videographer

    In talking to several of our friends about planning weddings, it seems that one of the difficult and most stress-inducing experiences for many couples is choosing their wedding photographer. I suppose this is because wedding photographs are such important mementos, the tangible reminders of the day’s events, and wedding albums have certainly been one of…

  • #5: Planning and Preparing Decorations

    It’s been a little while since the last wedding planning post. I took some time with this one, in part because I was busy with other things, but also (I confess) because this was the aspect of the wedding planning that I felt least involved with. To paraphrase my old roommate Spencer Gardner, it wasn’t…

  • “Night Scene” by George Oppen

    The drunken man On an old pier In the Hudson River Tightening his throat, thrust his chin Forward and the light Caught his face His eyes still blind with drink Said, to my wife And to me — He must have been saying Again — Good bye Momma Good bye Poppa On an old pier

  • George Oppen

    I will try to keep this post brief, and being brief, it will certainly fail to capture the depth and breadth of my admiration for George Oppen as a poet and a human being, but I feel the need to essay–to make an attempt. I’ve just finished, this evening, a thorough reading of Oppen’s Selected…

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  • #4: Planning Meals

    #4: Planning Meals

    One of the most fun (and most tricky) parts of wedding planning for us was selecting the food that we wanted to serve our guests. Weddings have historically been associated with feasting, and we were traditionally minded in at least this respect: that we wanted to share good food and drink with those we loved.…

  • #3: Designing and Making Rings

    Over the past few days, I’ve written several posts describing some of the choices that we made as we prepared for our marriage. One of the best choices we made was to make wedding bands for each other. Neither of us had have worked with metal in any significant way before, but making a wedding…

  • #2b: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 2

    This is second half of a two part post on making and designing invitations. While this post isn’t technically about invitations, it does involve design work and letter press printing, so I thought it would make a nice complement to yesterday’s post. Because Laurel and I are both poets, we decided that we wanted to…

  • #2a: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 1

    This is the next post in an ongoing series about Wedding Planning. In this post I’m going to describe the process by which we designed and made our wedding invitations–one of the most fun and exciting parts of the wedding planning process for me. Late last year, Laurel and I decided that we wanted to…

  • #1b: Events and Venues, Part 2

    Yesterday I wrote about our wedding ceremony itself and our decision about where to hold it. Today I want to finish the post by writing about the two other events we held that weekend: a pizza party on Friday evening (the night before the wedding), and our wedding reception held later in the evening on…

  • #1a: Events and Venues Part 1

    This is the first in a series of what I hope will be several posts looking at specific aspects of our wedding preparations. In this post I’ll describe our decisions around the events of the weekend on which we got married and the venues where we decided to hold those events. The first and most…

  • One Month Later: Introducing the Wedding Planning Series

    Last month, on April 21, I married my best friend Laurel Bastian in the presence of our families and a few very close friends. It was the happiest day of my life. We held the ceremony at the Gates of Heaven, a former synagogue now owned and operated by the City of Madison Parks department. The building…

  • At Long Last…

    At Long Last…

    I have an approved dissertation proposal! What’s its title, you ask? Get ready, because it’s really sexy. “Thinking with the things as they exist”: Ecocriticism and Objectivist Poetics. Yeah. A thrilling tour through what I’m calling an “Objectivist” poetics (the writing of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams,…

  • Lorine Was Our Matchmaker: A Love Story

    A picture of the finished rings. The ring Laurel made for me is on the left, the rings I made for her are on the right.

  • On Seeing the One Thing Clearly

    I’ve spent much of the past week trying with increasing desperation to write a dissertation proposal. It’s been the academic task that I’ve been ostensibly working on for nearly 18 months now, since I passed my prelims in early fall 2010. I don’t know what it has been so difficult for me to do, or…

  • Lorine Niedecker and the 99%

    One my favorite poets ever was Lorine Niedecker, a remarkable woman who spent most of her life living and writing on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River, just outside of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. At her death, she left behind a little library (including her now infamous ‘Immortal Cupboard‘, which consisted of, among other things, her…

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  • I’m Getting Married!

    Thought I often avoid the personal when writing publicly, I felt too much joy not to share this: Thanks to Sam Crowfoot for taking the photo.

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  • William Langewiesche on “Public Grief”

    William Langewiesche on “Public Grief”

    I spent some time catching up on the NPR Story of the Day Podcast today while I was folding laundry. Some were fairly memorable, but my favorite was an interview with this All Things Considered interview by Guy Raz with the journalist, novelist, and former pilot William Langewiesche. After the World Trade Center was destroyed, Langewiesche spent…

  • The Changing of the Seasons

    The Changing of the Seasons

    Each year it happens suddenly, sometimes surprisingly so. This year I began to notice it first when the pickup soccer game I play in ended when the light began to fail, and I biked home and showered and it wasn’t yet 8 o’clock. While puttering around the house the past few days, I closed the…

  • The Things I Do Not Remember: September 11, 2001

    Ten years ago, I was living in the LDS Missionary Training Centre (MTC) in Chorley, England, near Preston. I arrived there in early September at the beginning of what was to be a two year proselytizing mission for the Church. While I was at the MTC, I was assigned to live and study with a ‘companion’, the…

About the Author

Hi, I’m Steel Wagstaff. I’m the product manager for Pressbooks, a Canadian company making open source book publishing software.

I live in Eugene, Oregon with my wife, Laurel Bastian, and our elementary-school aged son.

I love poetry, music, libraries, reading, playing pickup soccer, & eating vegetarian food.

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