"My own experience [as a writer] indicates that it is mostly a career of rejection and lost illusions," Evan Connell wrote in a letter to me three years ago. Considering the critical acclaim he’s enjoyed over the past forty years (nominations for the National Book Award in both fiction and poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a…
The east coast was west for us, and cold. For sore throats my mother made egg-lemon soup, her face misting over the big pot as it boiled another sea, the oar-shaped ladle lost in steam. Now the yellow lamb broth twirls open like a sunflower when I say “avgo-lemono.” The language breaks on this little…
Cottage in which quiet persuades me I am the only one who has made myself useful, like God beginning to eat his young: One by one like poisoned mice the years smell in the wall. Hell's Peeping Tom with his ruddy face takes a closer look in the hole. At dawn and at dusk, a…
How was it that Myott came to understand the nature of his hands? It happened like this. Even as a child he was, by temperament, a shy, gentle boy, quiet and self-contained, one not given to coveting the marginal compensations offered by an increasingly noisy and unprincipled world. His mother, who managed a religious bookstore…
One looks into the well with his own eyes and watches the bucket always the same bucket go down into the dark. He knows there is a mother, a father, a river. This much is the same. But the dark is his own. They name it Freedom here. Your face comes up slow from the…
What is a farm but a mute gospel? Emerson Red deer stop sucking at turf as though the living came to life in a pose. And the queen-sheep, white ruffs on the neck, gaze with renewed immobility at their shepherd in moonboots stalking the volatile hush of a hidden reactor. In a true pastoral, he'll…
Not Jane Eyre again. Other people are moving on in life or going around in circles or failing utterly, but I'm still doing business at the same old stand. Every year a new load of students is dumped like laundry in front of me, needing to know Jane Eyre. Sometimes I take comfort in the…
Harvard Botanical Museum This is the story of a father's faith in transparency, the stuff of glass and flowers in light that made him teach his son to look so much at the water lily that its stem became a living vase that could be made with white glass, flames, and fine wire. In small…
I drew a circle of my blood I stood inside and made a vow I said that I would never move Until the animals appeared I stood inside and made a vow On the men with coyote heads Until the animals appeared Or the women with speckled wings The men with coyote heads All my…
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