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…

When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation …” —Gravesite of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Arlington National Cemetery (reinterment 1967), Quoting JFK’s Inaugural Address (1961) “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof,…

1. Lavabo y Espejo, by Antonio López García, is a painting of a bathroom sink and mirror. The sink, fused to the wall, floats. Its shadow grows west. The mirror above waits, empty, reflecting no person, only the square tiles of the opposite wall. On a transparent shelf between sink and mirror sit tools meant for…

If there’s one thing you learn working on a carnival, it’s how to be invisible. Despite all that bling and zip and wow, a carny’s goal is to straddle the distance between spectacle and crowd: to entice people toward the ticket booth, then slip into the background. In my family, it’s a long-standing tradition. Tricksters…

The two-lane highway clings to the lakeshore, passes through a rocky tunnel, and climbs Spooner Pass. I listen to music, telling myself my recent symptoms mean nothing, even as I feel a whoosh of vertigo. It’s late September, and the aspens are just starting to change—light green against the Sierra blue sky. It’s a beautiful…