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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Art Of Aging
As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.
April 2017Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A List Of My Utopias
My mother is a wood thrush, and my father is a great snipe. They aren’t my parents in this utopia. They’re birds who met once, then drifted apart, as birds do, so they could lead their own lives and become who they were meant to be. They have no children, bird or otherwise, tugging them in a different, boring direction.
April 2017Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Steps One Through Four
While my father was stationed in Germany and dating my mother, he wrote her a letter saying, “Someday I’d like to have twins with blond hair and blue eyes.” Twenty-seven years later, here I am, one of his identical blond-haired, blue-eyed twin girls.
April 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Love Your Enemies
The title “visiting instructor” suited me. Born into a life of hippie nomadism (even living out of a van at one point in my childhood), I’d been roaming since I’d left home at seventeen. An impulsive enrollment in graduate school at the age of thirty had been intended to impose order on my life, but at thirty-five I was as adrift as ever.
March 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Bella
How do you know when it’s time to take your autistic, bipolar twelve-year-old daughter to the psych ward? (They call them “behavioral units” now.) Is it when you find yourself sitting on her back and holding her arms to the ground while your wife lies on her legs? When she head-butts you the first time? The fifth? When she spits in your face?
March 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Death Of A Fisherman
We lived in a place between mountains in the trout lands. The fish dwelt in the chill of eternal movement, slick and lithe and beautiful, in the curve of sapphire rivers twinkling with western sun. This was why we’d moved to Montana when I was a boy — to chase fish, in the church of my father’s religion.
March 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Still Running
Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. She wasn’t looking to make history; she only wanted to run. But in 1967 the marathon was closed to women. So she entered as “K.V. Switzer” and ran in disguise for four miles until the race director, Jock Semple, jumped off the press truck and shouted, “Get the hell out of my race!” The picture of him trying to rip the number off her chest made headlines.
February 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What Love Looks Like From Here
We’ve been married nearly forty years, but we are still learning from my parents what love looks like: How it moves. All the shapes it takes. Though my parents can no longer care for themselves, they care for each other.
February 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Fourteen Steps
I have heard it said that most people die as they have lived. Judging by my sample group of one (me), I can also say that people plan their suicides as they have lived. Even though I was too depressed to read a book or watch a movie, I was going to have the most well-researched, most thoughtful suicide of all time.
February 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Write-Ins For President
I elect a climb of Precarious Peak that made me, and will forever keep me, humble as a pebble.
February 2017
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