Nonfiction

Education got us into this. – Murray Sinclair I will go to the archives. What will I look for? Another place, simply, where the past speaks? I call Linda Johnson, former Territorial Archivist of Yukon. I tell her I am going to the archives. What should I do there? What should I look at; what should…

I find in this wilderness a being who only wears pants, has always only worn pants. Lucky Brand jeans for dates, Levi’s for swagger, Carhartts for work. A self who carries a pocket knife everywhere because I never know when it might be necessary to open the straight-edged locking blade sheathed in the polished, blond…

Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…

An hour and a half north of Bishop, up a road with a view of Death Valley; that’s where to find the ancient bristlecone forest, and when I say ancient, first, there are trees in those woods who—who? That? Who—trees who are two to three thousand years old, who fully remember who they’ve always been. They…

For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home. She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to…

New York City is seventy degrees and sunny in late October, and on a bench outside the MET Cloisters Museum, my friend Sarah and I celebrate with a picnic. We sip coconut water, sop up hummus with pita, and savor the last dregs of summer. After a whole day in the museum, we cut through…

I’ve been noticing rocks everywhere I go—small or large, boulders or pebbles. My friend Thor began rock tumbling as a hobby while bored during the pandemic. He and his wife, Sara, moved temporarily into a small duplex while their dream house was being built on a bluff overlooking the Salish Sea, and polishing these rocks…

There is nothing particularly remarkable about a man my age having two artificial knees, except that everything about it is rather remarkable. Let’s start with the idea that a surgeon can take an electric saw, excavate the knee joint and portions of the adjacent femur and tibia, swap in a man-made hinge, re-wrap the existing…

When I left the house this morning, there was a ruckus in the grass, a rustling buzz, something digging under leaves. As I got closer and the buzzing intensified, I saw a cicada, pinned by a yellow and black, hard-shelled wasp. The cicada fought and shuddered and stilled. Then tried again to right itself. The…