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.
Pupusas, Puzzles, and Other Soft Returns
No music today—just a sigh and a lime mead that tasted like summer’s tail was flickering. I hiked in Sandy’s Canyon last week and had nothing profound to say about it. The person walking with me says that a lot. Sometimes, there is just nothing to say. I think there is wisdom in that—and also complacency, depending on the moment. As usual, I find myself half inspired and half annoyed. For a writer, that’s hard, and as someone who gets paid for having something to say, I’m glad I have a lot on my mind. But I’m getting used to the discomfort of...
read moreAh, Boats
At the first sign of spring in my neighborhood, from the top of the street to the bottom, out come the boats. They sit on trailers or atop Subarus and SUVs. They lean against fences and languish in driveways. The street itself becomes an asphalt river, a runway for a beauty contest of boats. Brad, up the hill, is heading to the San Juan with a load of new Doryaks. He came up with the hybrid of dory and SportYak, chubby little wooden wonders, and people like them and ask for more. So he builds more and out they ride on their maiden voyage...
read moreThe Grosbeak, the Dentist, and Me
Dear Friend, I hope this note finds you … Well, I hope this note finds you. I think that is enough for now. I want to tell you about the grosbeak I saw the other day while sitting in my parked car waiting to go into the dentist’s office. I was early, or maybe just not wanting to get out of the car. Recently, the slightest agitations of my body exhaust me. The grosbeak surprised me, flitting from the tree branch to my car. He perched on the sideview mirror, admiring itself, pecking at the glass before moving to the car next to mine and...
read moreShooting the Moon
I never learned to be much of a poker player. In school the game we played during lunch periods or at other odd free times was spades, about which I remember very little. No matter. Another game sticks much more in my memory, and it’s one that I still play on occasion with family and friends: hearts. It was my mother who was the prime instigator of this game. She had been brought up to go on no extended trip without a deck of cards, or two, and even though she had learned to play bridge as well, hearts was the game she chose to shuffle into...
read moreDown 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...
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