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…
Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter, a novel: About one of the most controversial figures in American history, the abolitionist John Brown, Banks’s epic novel is narrated by Brown’s son and comrade, Owen. The novel not only traces Brown’s crusade against slavery, leading to his famous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, but also becomes a deeply moving…
Was this your first, uh, infidelity, Mrs. Kennedy?” asked the somewhat prissy, prurient marriage counselor, to whom Arabel and Bertram Kennedy had gone after her teary confession that she loved another man-a very young man, Richard, not only unemployed in a gainful way but a poet, whom she meant to marry. A pause, while both…
Yes, they were like windows, all those medical jars, not the eyes themselves. No, they were like acorns, or rocks, hard, solid things—enemies of glass—yet kept safe, sealed, untouched, behind glass. Every day I would scrutinize the jars, take them one by one from their organized comb in the bottom bureau drawer of my father’s…
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