Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Down Deadman Wash
When you start looking, you see the potsherds everywhere–bits and pieces of the long-ago, scattered throughout the pinyon-juniper forest, standing out in the black volcanic sand like coins on a city street. At the edge of this dry mesa north of Flagstaff you can find pottery fragments in a wild array of colors and styles: Brick-red, slate-grey, cream-colored, black-on-white, black-on-red. The worked clay is smooth-surfaced, coiled or scalloped, sometimes randomly imprinted by human fingertips. For two days I’ve been taking long...
read moreA Mellow Kite-Rave
I wasn’t sure why I was up at 4 AM researching old school Dutch rave classics, but I knew it had something to do with KnoxKind, a young Instagram DJ prodigy who radiates pure joy. Watching him mix on a piece of equipment that probably costs more than my car, I couldn’t help but be pulled into the groove. He introduced me to Have You Never Been Mellow, originally sung by the woman from Grease—Olivia Newton-John. Her voice like candy frosting. The remix is by Keanu Silva. That phrase: Have you never been mellow? It caught me. Because no, I...
read moreThe Age of Brawn
Ever since we discovered the existence of dinosaurs, there’s been a subset of the population, and not just children, whose fascination with them and admiration for them should have warned us, decades ago, of the particular future we find ourselves in now. Brawn is a word not often used in the new vocabulary of our time, yet it is more and more at the root of our behavior. We have many words for thinkers: brainy, genius, intellectual, smarty pants, bright, precocious to name a few, and in our current social climate they sound like insults....
read moreTraining that worked
This letter started differently. The initial draft was about seeking and finding joy in everyday life. I’ve made a crow friend, the Juncos have returned and three chipmunks in our yard continue to play and chase each other around a large ponderosa tree out back. It’s nice to take a breath and imagine this for just a moment, isn’t it? But then this morning, I got an email alert for a publication I follow, Inside Higher Ed, and realized that everything happening nationally has arrived in Flagstaff, most of which is through the lens of the...
read moreThe Write Thing
It is a Wednesday night in early February. About 40 of us sit around tables in one of our conference rooms. We’ve gathered for the first of four meeting to help craft a university policy around AI use in academic work. As a writing professor, I’ve been awash in research, anecdotes, white papers, and jeremiads about AI and student writing. AI is a vast, extraordinary frontier and the most incendiary topic in academic circles these days. It has spooked the herd. An expert on the big, white screen Zooms in to give us a useful AI primer. I know...
read moreDry Winter
Every year around midwinter I seem to find myself back down in the Sonoran Desert for a spell, if only to shake off sub-freezing temperatures and remind myself what the warmth of the sun feels like. This year, it was a several-day trip that I took to Yuma a week ago. The immediate purpose was to see in person how the midwinter production of leafy green vegetables is organized on farms there. But I had a subsidiary purpose too: to spend at least a couple of hours hiking up and down some desert hills. This could be done, I’d learned, in the...
read moreKids with Paint
Is it mere vandalism, a messy rash on the skin of polite society? Or creativity trickling through cracks in mainstream culture? Graffiti is both, of course, and more. It is vox populi, the voice of the people. Graffiti is all around us. On a bathroom wall it might be nothing but crude sexual gestures. On city streets it can remind us that not all the news is fit to print. In repressive countries it speaks truth to power. Writing or painting on a wall serves the innate human drive for self-expression, a trait that’s as ancient as rock...
read moreSOS Playlist to my Lost Home
You might know me now as “the girl in the picture” or “the house fire person.” As I have been recently dubbed, to my face. I guess that’s one way to make a name for yourself in this town, though not the way I’d have chosen. So, how do I write a letter from home when home itself no longer exists? Since my first few letters were music-centric, I’m deciding to stick with that theme for now. Lucy Dacus’s song Historian has always struck a nerve with me. I’ve never been in a relationship long enough for someone to keep track of my...
read moreThe Right Moment
This is the story of a deer, a man, a woman, a tree and two funerals. It takes place in Georgia, down near the Florida line, on a hunting plantation that belongs to my father’s brother. It’s no Tara and the house on the land is no Twelve Oaks. It’s a modern house, simple and practical and beautiful in its practicality. It sits on a rise with a view of longleaf pine forest. Below are the kennels, the barns and the plantation manager’s house made of white brick. At the time of this story Bull was the manager. His given name was something else...
read moreGive more, expect less
As a new year’s “resolution,” I’ve been promising myself less time on social media, for at least eight years now. A little over a week into January so far, I can say that I quit this resolution (again) faster than any diet I’ve ever been on. Don’t get me wrong, social media and the internet have enhanced many aspects of my life. What started as a way to stay in touch with friends across the country became an educational platform to learn about the experiences, beliefs, and values of others. Even when debates get heated and devolve into ad...
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