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“Unmoored: A Meditation”
“Weeks have passed since the evening explosion in a neighbor’s attached garage, the fire that followed consuming the bulk of their house before the volunteer firemen’s hoses were even unspooled.”
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“The Water Lot”
“Stories were the common currency in lumber camp, kitchen, and barn. Tink, who began logging at 13 years old and weighing 108 pounds, blessed our family with a lot of those tales.”
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“Windows”
“Jim and I had restored many double hung wood windows during the time we worked together. We had also become pretty good friends, and then partners in a small but fairly successful restoration business.”
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“When I Get Botox I Think of Bees”
“It’s in my blood, migraine: in the genetic messages encoded in my cells — inherited flips switched, triggers tripped — inevitable. In the inextricable link between my headaches and monthly bleeds.”
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“Rearranging Max Eastman’s Library”
“My task was straightforward: to create some kind of order that would render this collection usable again for faculty members staying there for fellowships or research leaves, while also sorting out items that shouldn’t be there.”
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“Better Not to Say: Apology in Poetry”
“The present cultural moment in the US does not seem receptive to the inevitability of discomfort as it pertains to living with one another and of letting each other move on, or get on, with their lives … there is always someone looking to hold another to account and/or demand them to apologize publicly.”
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“Coming Back to the Page 101 Times,” an excerpt from Craft
“My struggle with meditation taught me an important lesson about my creative process: the imagination flourishes in that split-second before the editorializing and judgmental mind intrudes.”
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“I see a postman everywhere”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards
“Bishop often mailed postcards from locales while expressing a longing, on the written (verso) side, to be elsewhere. Or she editorialized the postcard’s depiction of her location, adding captions, often ironizing or qualifying it.”
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“My Last Margarita”
“My years of allowing my drinking to increase, of guzzling margaritas, had changed something fundamental. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t capable of cutting down anymore. I either drank or I didn’t.”
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“Walking, Then Finding Home”
“… every road to school was haunted by the ‘eve-teasers.’ Young men in flared pants, with wavy hair bobbing behind their ears, who leered and jeered at, followed and, at times, assaulted girls with impunity.”
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“On Arrangement”
“Poetry gave me logics that were affective, associative, metaphorical, linguistic, material, alive to mixed emotions. Its patterns brought me toward things like thoughts. Its thinking wasn’t narrowly systematic. It was systemic.”
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“Preservations”
“A lifelong binge drinker, he’d lost jobs, wrecked a car, punched holes in the wall of his house, but what had made my grandmother throw him out for good was stealing the three silver dollars my mother had won in an eighth grade essay writing contest.”
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On Reading The Postcard and Reclaiming Jewish Stories
“I spent hours reading immigration papers and marriage certificates, but I longed for the sort of sensory-rich details that Berest uncovered in her research …”
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“Bad News”
“He started walking west toward the Mississippi River which bordered the park, but he disappeared in the hazy darkness. The woman heard a splash. When she couldn’t locate him, she called the police.”
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“On Whales and Language”
“In order to communicate meaningfully with animals, we have to set aside the fantasy in which they become ‘just like’ us.”