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…
My father always said he was a betting man and that his first love was gambling. Dice and cards, not sports or cars, not girls. Curbside on the gritty Depression-era streets of Providence, Rhode Island, he honed this practice rolling dice against the gutter or shuffling cards with the grace and speed of a magician….
I am a child of a Confessor, born in 1956, the same year the McCarthyesque Chinese Confession Program was sanctioned. Its purpose, simply put, was to seek and flush out Chinese—arriving or already landed—who held derivative citizenships. America began with an open door policy that admitted everyone but "lepers, prostitutes, and morons." The Chinese were…
After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…
On a motorcycle, a dash to the grocery store takes on epic proportions. It requires armor: you pull on stiff black boots; zip yourself into a thick leather jacket with kevlar plates at the shoulder and elbow; squeeze into your helmet, buckle the chinstrap; pull on long leather gloves with hard knuckles. Hazards abound: cars…
“If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable.” —Paolo Bartoloni I. It was snowing that day. A scree of snow fell against a sky so white…
From White Out , a memoir “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.” -Hamlet My Dad puts the gun in my hands. The barrel is cold. Cold like a rock you lay across in winter before it snows. But it’s autumn now. The trees all around…
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