Reprinted from Issue 3 of Ploughshares, Winter 1972. (guest edited by James Randall) Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926. He graduated from the Avon School in 1944, served in the last years of World War II, and until 1952 worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from newspaper rewrite man to…
It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…
Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…
There was something secretive about it. When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year…
Sex and the dead, Yeats wrote in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, are the only subjects of interest to the studious mind. He was, I suppose, trying to chat her up; and far from the only one to have noticed the links between our comings and goings, the ins and outs of life, such as…
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss…
I began naming my children when I was four. The habit launched itself via the succession of dolls that were quickly discarded, and the numerous stuffed animals exhausted from affection. There were also objects like the secondhand family car and the rubber plant. Sometimes I named tools like pencils, or apparel like shoes. Naming was…
In the summer of 1991, I was on the beach in Los Angeles. I should have been home in New York, caring for sick friends, but I had won a grant and fled a boyfriend and I was living for a few months with two friends in Hollywood. One afternoon we went to Santa Monica,…
Siba keeps shaking his head as if pushing a vision away. His chest is heaving, tears are spilling down his cheeks, but he is silent, choking back any sound. We are walking west on East Eighty-sixth Street, the leafless trees of Central Park a few blocks ahead. We move under a green awning and past…
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