Nonfiction

ba·ja·da noun 1: a steep curved descending road or trail 2: an alluvial plain formed at the base of a mountain by the coalescing of several alluvial fans Origin 1865-70, Americanism: from the Spanish feminine past participle of bajar: to descend December 20 Santiago quit the academy yesterday. We were on our way into town…

The town where you grew up—the place you’ll always think of as home—has three stoplights, a grocery store, a twin cinema, a post office, two dozen churches, three banks, a hospital, a handful of gas stations, and three factories that produce custom wood furniture, Lee jeans, and outboard motors. There’s a main street where teenagers…

In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of…

an excerpt from In a Foreign Country The map haunts you. You spotted it the day you arrived, hanging on the back of an office door. The words “Land Mine Areas, Bosnia-Herzegovina” are printed in large letters across the top, and each land mine area is labeled on it with a tiny, pale red dot….

I am not inclined to go off with strangers, yet here I am sitting outside a bar in Miradoux, a village in southwestern France, about to embark on a two-day journey along the Chemin, the Way, with Priscilla, a woman I met just days before. We will walk along a route called Le Puy, which…

There might have been other reasons Heather and I beat the hell out of each other when we performed in The Miracle Worker in the fall of 1984, but the best I could come up with was that she and I just weren’t able to fake it. Heather and I had been in a few…

The auditorium falls to a hush. The audience settles in their seats. Sun backlights the room through a wall of windows: this evening of summer solstice. The first reader walks to the podium. She is a novelist, and this novelist smiles at the room, a graceful and warm and kind smile, welcoming everyone and introducing…

Last summer, with a serial rapist roaming Ann Arbor, I asked my undergraduates to read an essay called “In the Combat Zone” by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which she argues that if women felt comfortable using firearms, they wouldn’t present such passive victims for men intent on harming them. One of my female students, fair…

excerpts from a memoir in progress Near the end of your cremation, when your blood and eyeballs, skin and muscle, organ meat and marrow have vaporized up the smokestack into the wind above this river-hugging corridor populated by machine shops and body shops, an adult bookstore called Fantasy Island with a cartoon palm tree on…