There is no dog: On ridiculous love
In memory of Rev. Dr. Travis DuPriest (1944 – 2021)When I learned that Rev. Dr. DuPriest had died, I felt sorrow and that exquisite little spark of anguish that always flickers and stings when we look upon the distant past – the far away corners, the furthest past, the past when we, ourselves were newer, rawer, more innocent, more different.Time moves forward. There is no choice. Some days this simple fact makes me absolutely apoplectic. Other days, I repeat my mantras, let my feelings move through me, and let go. Once in...
read moreThree vegan bonbons and one tortilla chip: On community and the unknown
Photo by Heather Gruber. My sister, in town from Chicago for the first time in two years, caught this moment I shared with my students during the Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy Commencement ceremony. We did what we’d been doing for a long time: we held each other up. Outside of pictures like this one, I snapped very few photographs during graduation or my sister’s visit. True togetherness feels more essential now. The kind where the cell phones are down, eye contact is being made, and – if safe – hugs are being given and received....
read moreQUIT LAUGHING, KEETRA: A LETTER TO THE CLASS OF 2021
Dear Graduating Class of 2021 (but quite specifically Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy graduating class of 2021), I see you. You are brilliant. I love you. Remember this: if you were my student, at any point, you are always my student. What that means is that I want to hear from you, hear about you, and that I will carry you always in the lake of my heart. And while I wish I could take credit for that metaphor (get ready for those AP exams, children of America), I must give the credit where it is due: Dante Aligheri. Yes, that, Dante...
read moreHEART CRACKS: ON THE WONDERFUL UNTHINKABLE
Unthinkable. This is a word I have returned to often—in the past 15 months—when “unprecedented” just didn’t cut it. Let’s face it, if the empty ubiquity of the word “unprecedented” has taught us anything this year, it has taught us that the English language is still very much in its infancy. So I lean into “unthinkable.” Not even the inherently negative connotations it carries, but the word itself: what I have not yet thought of, and what I could never possibly predict. The anxious impossibility of never being able to accurately and precisely...
read moreBOB, NEBRASKA: This Must Be The Place
Education has become a political flashpoint. The grownups are arguing; at the center of the argument lies the stinking, rotting carcass of American education. Last Friday, Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy (a place I’m proud to call home as an educator) held an all-school assembly that centered issues impacting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and the voices/thoughts of our BIPOC neighbors and friends. The assembly was organized by my colleagues Janeece Henes and Michael Levin; the former mayor of Flagstaff, Coral Evans,...
read moreAn American story in real time
As I write this, the US Capitol is still under siege by a group of American terrorists who were provoked by the words and actions (or inactions) of a small-minded conman who managed to slither his way into the Oval Office. Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday in Washington. Photo by Jose Luis Magana/AP I watch like so many of my fellow Americans: with horror, disbelief and sorrow. That we are leaned toward our televisions, watching the insurrection against democracy itself, seems like the...
read moreLeaving Flagstaff: On trying to save your own life
When Sarah and I talked about places to live, if not Flagstaff (we loved Flag, but were reluctant to fully commit), I, naturally, wanted to return to Chicago—to green, to Lake Michigan, heavy thunderstorms, brutally cold winters, my sister, my parents, so many friends and extended family. Sarah always proposed Tucson, her hometown. (Funny how we’re partial to where we come from, no matter our complicated feelings about it—trust me, I have complicated feelings about Chicago). I always nixed Tucson, arguing, “I couldn’t stand the heat.” Sarah...
read moreDigital: On returning to school in 2020
Toward winter’s end, it became difficult to listen to music. My world and the whole damn world had changed, was changing, so rapidly. Music, which has brought me comfort in some of my darkest hours, just wasn’t cutting it—every song a reminder of a life before. Even the songs I heard for the first time last September, when we took the kids on a trip to Los Angeles—like Nicki Minaj’s “Roman Holiday” (thanks, Carson)—were too painful. We stayed together, teachers and students, in an AirBnb. We shared bathrooms, we went to crowded museums and...
read moreMore than tacos; On silliness
I remember learning to swim. I think I was five. We were in Sanibel Island, Florida. My father and grandfather put me in water wings and made me paddle from one to the other as they distanced themselves further apart, like human goal posts. I was eager to ditch the inflatable cuffs. In the water I felt safe, which is a feeling I seldom feel anymore. Water, for me, is a religious experience — the feeling of weightlessness, the feeling of a body that is not failing, a body that moves easily, comfortably. In the water, a body without fear....
read moreOn Proper Goodbyes
Last week, I said goodbye to my seniors, the class of 2020. We gathered, social-distance-style, at the Coconino County Fairgrounds. Graduates and their families decked out their cars like parade floats, tailgated with cake and sandwiches, and at the end of the evening each family turned on their headlights so graduates could step out of vehicles and throw their caps for all to see. From the stage, where valedictorian and salutatorian made their speeches, where faculty (including myself) read letters parents, friends and loved ones wrote for...
read moreFalse narratives; On what’s supposed to happen
Last Friday night, as I brushed my teeth, I heard loud music playing from a neighbor’s apartment and lifted open the bathroom window to put my face to the night air, my ears to the music. I couldn’t make out the song, but the sound was so close to the old normal I could hardly pull myself away. When everything changes, we become myopically drawn to what we previously failed to notice. Haven’t all of us, during this quarantine, been converted to a devout belief that normalcy is fragile? Or maybe that belief developed earlier—in the wake of...
read moreStrange days indeed: on choosing grace
I have to be honest: this lingering cold is beginning to concern me. I’m starting to doubt my own conservative assumptions about just how much toilet paper we actually need. Dread is encroaching. Last week, at my wife’s insistence, in the middle of a snow squall, we made our way to the grocery store to “stock up on supplies.” We bought cereal and canned vegetables and boxes of whole wheat pasta. We did something we never do at Whole Foods and bought three bags worth of groceries (you can do the math). There tends to be a sweet giddiness to...
read moreMagnificent hits; On loss and new stages
In January, I was diagnosed with recurrent, metastatic, stage 4 breast cancer. Nine years ago, in Milwaukee, I felt relieved to only be stage 2, to only be halfway. However, from that day until last month, as I sat in a doctor’s office with a view of the Sedona red rocks, I expected stage 4 would someday come. After the diagnosis, despite my advanced stage, the protocol was familiar: blood work, nurses offering tissues, surgeries planned, oncology designed, my very own copy of a breast cancer handbook. In Milwaukee, after receiving said...
read moreOn waiting: What’s this? Don’t know
By the time this article posts, I will know whether or not I have cancer. I enjoy teaching my students about writing hooks. Sometimes, albeit rarely, the moment you’re living in provides the best possible hook. I’ve also told students who wish to write, “Start with where you are right now.” So for this piece, I’m starting where I am right now: waiting. When I was in my 20s, a former professor-turned-mentor-turned-friend gave me a set of mala beads and taught me my first mantra: “What’s this? Don’t know.” I’ve used both the beads and the...
read moreOn snow; There’s a love metaphor in there somewhere
This week, I wanted to write about snow, but I didn’t want to sit with my own snow thoughts and so I enlisted the wisdom of my Intro to Creative Writing class, which consists of students ranging from eighth grade to senior year in high school. Most, though not all, have lived in Flagstaff all their lives. I knew they’d have some insight on the matter. Before we wrote, we made a list of snow pet peeves: Tourists walking in the middle of the road! Dirty snow is the most depressing thing in the world. Wet dogs! Broken sleds. Which was...
read moreOn Halloween; Serial killers, otherness and change
What used to scare me: the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, that part in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazi’s face melted off, escalators at the Woodfield Mall. These days, I’m scared by far more terrifying, albeit everyday, forces, but I do like Halloween, arriving precisely when hoodies and extra blankets are warranted. My students are passionate about Halloween. Middle schoolers laugh about the people who keep their lights off “but the television is obviously still on” and about “gross candy” and “the lady who gives out...
read moreLove hurts; Taking sweet and tender simplicity where you can
We’re fostering kittens again. My wife is passionate about cats. In one of the first pictures I saw of her as a child, she’s proudly hugging a resigned Siamese to her little body. Without solicitation, she shows people pictures of our cats the way proud parents might show pictures of their children. While there are people who genuinely hate dogs (or fear them), on the matter of cats, I’ve found people generally fall into two distinct categories: “Indifferent” and “fiercely obsessed.” In this way, cats are kind of like the U2 of domesticated...
read moreBack to school in America; A syllabus for the new age
When I was in second grade, I had a teacher, an energetic, funny, charismatic woman beloved by all her students, who used to routinely sing us a few lines from “On the Sunny Side of the Street”: “Grab your coat/ get your hat/ leave your worry on the doorstep . . .” This past week, my second grade teacher passed away and folks from my class (all of us now in our 40s) effortlessly remembered this detail. I’m not sure what worries, at 7, we had to “leave on the doorstep” but I’m sure we had some and these lyrics, delivered effervescently by our...
read moreRun like hell; On the kindness of strangers
I love to travel, but I am a nervous flyer. While I’m not an engineer, or a math person, or even a science person, the principles of flight make sense to the logical part of my brain. It’s the primal part that can’t fathom the act. When I was a toddler there was a terrible plane crash at O’Hare. All 271 people onboard were killed, as well as a few people on the ground. Not counting acts of terrorism, this was the worst passenger plane disaster on U.S. soil. My father worked near the crash site. I heard the story of this plane’s demise many...
read moreHome; Or whatever John Denver really means
Two weeks ago, my grandmother died. She was almost 94. Her death was not a tragedy, not unexpected, but as with all deaths, it was a painful loss, so although it was the second-to-last week of school, I flew to the Midwest to attend services. When I go to Chicago, I usually say, “I’m going home.” However, I’ve spent the last five years in the Southwest and have come to question whether the Midwest is still home. The question of home is one that dominates my world literature course, where students read The Odyssey and Red Azalea in which...
read moreJoy, the scarce resource
As I pull weeds from the garden beds that, last year, yielded a handful of arugula and four withered peas, I tell my wife, “Maybe it will be different this time.” In the 1989 film adaptation of Pet Sematary, this is the same line the main character repeats to himself and God as he buries one body after the next in the haunted graveyard, only to finally, mercifully, be decapitated by the zombie wife of his own making. Though I come from a long line of passionately successful gardeners, I never developed a real interest in the endeavor until I...
read moreEmail fatigue; Write back
When I was a little girl, my step-grandfather made my siblings and me small cedar chests with bronze hinges. I’ve kept mine. Ever since I left home for college, it’s moved with me. Inside are decades of concert ticket stubs (Violent Femmes, Blur, Morrissey), postcards from Wisconsin, Bali, France, notes from friends that date back to my junior year in high school, letters in great abundance. For as much as I love the immediacy of electronic communication, rummaging through the cedar chest makes me mournfully nostalgic for those handwritten...
read moreBaskets of poems; Or how I learned to stop being so cynical and enjoy a smalliday
My wife calls them “smallidays”—small holidays, St. Patrick’s Day, Labor Day, Valentine’s Day. Last month, as I glumly removed ornaments and got ready to chuck our tree, she reminded me, “There’s still a bunch of smallidays to look forward to…” This was little comfort as I haven’t put stock in those holidays since I was a kid. Most years I don’t even remember until I catch someone wearing green, until I’m reminded of an impending three-day weekend, until a student mentions Cupid. Valentine’s Day feels especially tired, cliché,...
read moreThe Donner Party What do you know?
Over winter break I spent some time listening to a podcast and reading a book about The Donner Party. While I would like to say I became spontaneously interested in Westward Expansion or the notion of Manifest Destiny, the truth is a friend made a reference to the Donner Party during a conversation and I was reminded of this little American History blip that I’d taken for granted, imagining, as a kid, it was just a bunch of weirdo bonnetted pioneers in covered wagons gnawing on cold human bones. Suddenly, in winter, in the Southwest, I was...
read moreCrying in English class; On history, softness and snow
Last week was World AIDS Day, it snowed in Flagstaff, George H.W. Bush died and my AP Literature class began reading Tony Kushner’s Angels in America — a play about AIDS, ancestry, politics, community, America itself. The present moment often has a way of colliding with my curriculum. About this, I feel conflicted. On one hand, my students and I never run out of things to say to one another. On the other hand, we are forced to repeatedly contend with the painful complexities of the past as they are made manifest in our time. I am glad...
read moreOn ink and ancient virtue; The story of who you are, who you will become
When the rain stops falling in the Catalina Foothills, my father-in-law takes me outside to smell creosote. He gestures broadly to the vast desert before us: “All that’s glistening is creosote,” he says, and leans over the adobe wall bordering his property, picks a small clump of leaves from a tree, puts them to my nose. “Smell that.” As I’m inhaling creosote, he asks, “Have you ever done anything that would keep you off the Supreme Court?” We’re in the wake of the Kavanaugh appointment, and my father-in-law is a retired judge. “Oh, maybe . ....
read moreSunflowers and sunny days; A meditation on boredom
While he drove me and my brother to school, my father listened to traffic reports. The newscasters spoke so fast their words smeared together and I always heard, “Inbound on the outbound Kennedy you’re looking at an hour five,” causing me, from an early age, to believe (somewhat correctly) that navigating the Chicago expressway system was one of life’s greatest dangers and mysteries. Beyond this, I found the reports desperately boring. All work commutes are routine, but the commute to and from my job in Flagstaff is the most peaceful of my...
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