Nonfiction

Secondary Indifferents

Every evening dries on a roof of tar, and the screens twang under the weight of bugs in a place not yet given to me. Metaphor doesn't mediate our understanding of the world; we take what comes. Cars in the late night and screams from children are linked to appetite, and make me fear for…

Letter to Brenda Hillman

24 may dear brenda, i have three mfa letters to write; lately i have been obliging all my students to write on the same schedule, which means i have one week of very hard work, followed by, or interspersed with, three weeks of anxious leisure, in which i wonder what i ought to do with…

Bresh

I could remember a big black car bumping my dog Skippy's head on the highway when I was seven years old. Skippy didn't die, but he went insane. I remember hearing dogs howl in the Sacramento Delta migrant camp where I grew up, accurately signaling someone's death the day after. When I was ten, I…

What’s A Story?

i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…

A Weed Among the Flowers

I little knew the turbulent time which lay ahead of me when on the telephone my friend Margaret Lane invited me, subject to the consent of the Chinese authorities, to join a little party including herself and her husband for a month's visit to China in April 1957. It was during that deceptively hopeful season…

Study for Sleep (cover)

What's A Story Mary Ward Brown Rosellen Brown Robert Cohen Carol Cosman Louise Glück Brenda Hillman Rhoda Huffey Jeff Hush August Kleinzahler Phillip Lopate Thomas McGuane Sue Miller Oscar Pemantle Mary Peterson Edgar Poma C. E. Poverman David Reid Danny Romero Roger Salloch Jean-Paul Sartre Gary Soto Edited by Leonard Michaels ISSN 0048-4474

Against Joie de Vivre

Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…