1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…
In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…
In December of 1936, George Orwell, on his way to fight in the Spanish Civil War, stopped in Paris, where he had a chat with Henry Miller. It would be the two writers’ only encounter. Neither was particularly well-known or financially secure at the time. Miller had published Tropic of Cancer two years prior, but…
I’m early again, so I sit idling in the parking lot, watching the young boys shoot baskets through the chain-link fence. My windows are open with the AC blowing at my knees on low. I just want to feel the wind on my face, but I can’t stand this heat right now, not when I’m…
She was seven and having her bacon and orange juice in the kitchen on North Kings Road in West Hollywood. Behind her and above the sink the jalousies were angled open. Outside were palm and hibiscus and there was weather. You could hear it. She looked at me and stopped chewing. Me at that age…
Circa 1960, in an early recording with La Sonora Matancera, Cuban songstress Celia Cruz belts out a street vendor’s tongue-twister offering candy by the kilo. Los traigo de coco y piña, de limón y miel de abeja. I’ve got coconut and pineapple, lemon and bees’ honey. De piña para las niñas y los de miel…
1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…
Romania, 1983 The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…
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