When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious…
The River I’ll admit I picked Ecuador for its symbolic possibilities. I wanted a place where things were reliable: twelve hours of darkness, twelve hours of light. It was the end of the old year, two weeks before my thirty-third birthday, the age my Catholic friend Tony said all things would be revealed to me….
Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches— Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return …
Stuart Dybek works with a curious mix of spontaneity and retentiveness. He wrote most of the stories for his first collection, for instance, under a spell. He’d put on Eastern European classical music, and the words would simply pour out. To this day, Dybek relies on music for inspiration, listening to jazz, jotting in a…
Right in front of everyone at Two-Bit’s Worth, my last girlfriend called me unfit to drink in public, and I told her she was heavyset and that, after three months dating, I had come to realize she would always be heavyset. In this ugly way she walked out of my life for good. I was…
“The space we breathe is also called distance . . .” —Linda Gregg The trail to the ocean is steep. The grass we walk through, high and wet. I hear clear wind sighing through slender pine, silence between your words: that place your loneliness lives where I want to slip under, move unbroken as…
There is a Zen saying, “Not knowing, we proceed.” At some level this is true for us all. For Jane Hirshfield, such moving forward through enigma can be terrifying, but is also “the richest place to be.” Having recently published a book of essays and a book of poems, she is now beginning a new…
In 1967, when I was ten years old, my mother married Harlan Frame, and we moved that summer to a house he’d bought for us in Slaughter, Texas. Harlan was a farmer, a word my mother found too plain; she’d tell people Harlan ranched, though he kept fewer than a dozen cows on a patch…
You preferred to reserve a table in the corner, and over the appetizers you may apologize, but first we must order the cook to harvest well, tuck away the sorry scattering of nostalgia under a wing or beneath a bone. No real specters this evening, as your plot spins out over the aromas and glances…
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