Blog
Starter
| November 8, 2021 I've forgotten about the sourdough starter again, bubbling in the warmth of the oven light, the only temperature-controlled environment we have in our apartment. The only control I can exert lately, as the world keeps somersaulting into another new normal.
Meditative, Lyric, Useful: Two New Books on Writing
| November 5, 2021 From Michigan and Milkweed come two new books about writing, personal explorations on self, identity, and nonfiction form.
Keywords: book review
Retirement
| November 1, 2021 My father-in-law, Vietnam vet, ex-medic, sat in his low-slung love seat. The thermostat was set at 80. Outside was 100. Through the sliding glass, the Strip shimmered like an alternate planet. If we could sell this house, he said again, we could be nearer you guys.
Buckeye Pyre
| October 25, 2021 We circle the farm first, gathering storm-downed branches for the pyre of a fallen buckeye tree like funerary lilies, without mourning the giant whose dark-stare fruit we bucketed at harvest to safeguard the cattle. Half each chestnut sweet, the other lethal.
The Heavy Bag
| October 18, 2021 For three years of my teenage life, I fought. Around 5 PM each day, I'd walk into the boxing gym—a repurposed garage—and carefully wrap up my hands, winding the black cloth over and over my wrist and palm, in and out through my knuckles, until my hands felt safe.
Two Hot Zabagliones
| October 11, 2021 Feeling lonely and hopeless, I went ahead anyway. Long before computers took over the planet, ManMate, a gay dating service, mailed me a multipage paper form to complete.
Lamp Light
| October 4, 2021 I'm not worried about the meat in the freezer or the milk in the fridge. The only concern I have about the sudden soupy darkness is how I can maximize my time spent soaking in it.
The Weight of Grief Goes Round and Round
| October 1, 2021 Tarn Wilson’s memoir in essays, In Praise of Inadequate Gifts, has things to teach us about unusual topics.
Keywords: book review
Blues
| September 27, 2021 He taught the dog to howl when it was just a puppy. I’d find the two of them sitting on the couch together, both tipping their faces skyward, eyes closed, solemn, focused. The little beast mimicked his best friend, his idol, his everything—in harmony, they pursed their lips and aroooo-ed as loud as their lungs could push their animal voices.
The Inside of Bones
| September 20, 2021 His small voice cuts a jagged line into the not-quite-morning quiet. My body reflexively lifts out of bed, finds its way over the piles of tiny cars and books, through the stone darkness of our new apartment, our first without his father. I steer myself into the bedroom he shares with his younger brother, find his bed, crawl in.
The Last Perfection
| September 13, 2021 The week-old "Going out of Business" sign sagged in the store window the last night my father baked. Bread and sandwich buns near midnight. Coffee cakes and sweet rolls at two a.m. Last, as always, the deep-fried doughnuts were finished near dawn while my mother readied the display cases where cookies, cakes and pies were already waiting for their last opportunity to sell. At six-thirty, he filled cream puffs and whoopee pies, and then he drove home to sleep.
Noticing as Rebellion, as Resistance
| September 10, 2021 In his new book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, McAnulty, who is seventeen and lives with autism, writes autobiographically about environmental conservation and activism.
Keywords: book review
Life Takes Place Like This
| September 6, 2021 My student tells me she is going home and then is found hanging by a shower rod on Tuesday afternoon. We do not sleep. All that was hers is now ours to sort through. We speak about her now in past tense.
Filling Cupboards
| August 30, 2021 You don't start out with coffee cups. You start with single-serve espressos and chai lattes at the coffee shop around the corner from your co-op. But a coffee together after work becomes morning coffee for two.
Resting Place
| August 23, 2021 When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird.
Ascension Garden
| August 16, 2021 The first time, you drive by yourself. You have some idea you are going there, but are still surprised that you know the way, without her, through the turning and turning driveways. Left, left, left, left. Park near the rusted dripping spigot.
We Don't Know Their Names. But We Know Their Character.
| August 13, 2021 David Lazar’s latest collection, The Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is an artfully attuned set of essays that analyzes the delightful nuances of cinema’s Golden Age and the author’s love of its movies.
Keywords: book review
Merriment
| August 9, 2021 I was walking to the store with my brother when we stumbled upon a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. He was in his early thirties, the age my father must have been when he left us, with a widow's peak and roseate cheeks.
Home to Roost
| August 2, 2021 I liked the hens, with their kind eyes and soft, red feathers. I was seven, and I wanted to sleep with them, to nestle with them, because they felt like a dozen mothers, all watching out for me. My real human mother said I could, so I took a blanket down there at bedtime and laid it out on the floor of the little wooden triangle coop that used to be my playhouse.
My Father's Only Recipe
| July 26, 2021 First, take pork spare ribs. Hack them up with an impossibly large cleaver into bite-sized pieces. Rub them with a proprietary mix of star anise, black beans, garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, and secrets. Never ask him what happened in Taiwan, or why his mother never spoke the name of her former husband again.
Name
| July 19, 2021 I've recently dedicated myself to learning the names of trees. Before I never thought it made much of a difference, but the beauty of their names compelled me.
Morning
| July 12, 2021 When my infant daughter wakes at two in the morning and her father cannot coax her back to sleep, she and I curl up on the mattress in the guest room below the big window, and I drift off with her tiny fingers gripping my thumb.
Carrot
| July 5, 2021 Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me.
Big Ideas in Bite-Sized Essays
| July 2, 2021 Jason Schwartzman’s first book, No One You Know, contains sixty-two essays—many of them just a few paragraphs long—in a concise 155 pages. Each tiny essay in this fragmented collection illustrates a brief, memorable interaction with a stranger, creating the effect of a photo collage.
Keywords: book review
The Last To Turn In
| June 28, 2021 Everyone went to sleep, except my cousin and me. I lingered a bit, my own children upstairs, sprawled across air mattresses, or burrowed in rented cribs. He wanted to stay awake, to party. Or at least have a companion to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
The Extinction Museum: Exhibit #207 (Glass Coke Bottle—Labeled “Helium”)
| June 21, 2021 Parties were for destroying. You hit the patient hero with a stick until he broke open to rain down candy. Every wall was filled with pinholes and sword dents. In the backyard, your friends tore up the grass in handfuls, sundering unwary worms, leaving gouges to slip on after rain.
Ceremony
| June 14, 2021 She dances beside the highway each morning. You're driving your son to school, in thick traffic with lights to make, when you notice her across a stretch of construction and broken streets. Bearing marks of itinerancy and sleeping rough, she reaches the center of an empty lot, and it begins: a dancer’s poise with sure cadence and confident, inevitable steps.
Reclamation
| June 7, 2021 The Army Corp of Engineers lowered the water level of the Mississippi River below St. Anthony Falls so they could inspect the locks. My wife took the kids down there at my suggestion. Children frolicked in areas where, in any other circumstance, they would surely drown.
We Might As Well Die Laughing
| June 4, 2021 John Rember’s essay collection is both delightful and depressing. The ten essays, each divided into ten segments (thus, the “hundred little pieces”), flesh out his perspective as our civilization and its natural environment crumbles.
Keywords: book review
Notes to My Father
| May 31, 2021 On most surfaces in my house, you'll find short notes I've written for my father. I flip the phone's camera on FaceTime so he can read them when he can't hear me. He mouths them slowly out loud: Be good and obey nurses. Put hearing aids in ears. Today is Jacob’s birthday. Stay awake in daylight and sleep in the dark. Change into clean clothes or God won’t take you to heaven. Call after dinner. I love you.
