Posted by Jean Rukkila on Jun 3, 2010

In a classroom at a middle school the effervescent students wanted me to know one among them “doesn’t talk.” Every day we’d all draw and add words to our drawings: I was the honored guest there for a two week arts in education gig. The teacher was a genius with seventh graders. And one among us they called “selectively mute.” I liked her doodles of Ren and...

Posted by Jean Rukkila on Apr 29, 2010

I tore the label off of a pint bottle of water to write down the title for this column. On a recent hike I had a pen in my pocket but no paper, and I wanted to keep the sentences that seemed to bob up from the current of my thoughts like a cork that won’t sink. I like to take the cork from dinner’s wine bottle along when I walk by the rivulet at Schultz...

Posted by Jean Rukkila on Mar 25, 2010

I want Warrior Mouse. As soon as I saw him in the window at Puchteca Indian Art I started putting the occasional extra five-dollar bill into a tea tin savings bank: For weeks I’ve walked San Francisco Street to the post office so I can admire the feather on his head and the white spots on his delicate but fierce mouse body. I make up stories about where he...

Posted by Jean Rukkila on Mar 18, 2010

One recent night I e-mailed a photo of my bookshelf to a writer at The New Yorker. It’s hard to recall quite what seized my shy person’s soul to cause me to upload a rectangle of my private life into a stranger’s computer across the continent. I do know I felt wonder to read in a national forum—The Book Bench—an article about analyzing a person by...

Posted by Jean Rukkila on Feb 11, 2010

Falling out of orbit in the Friendship 7 space capsule: as a girl I wanted to do it! Maybe that’s when I became eager to spend company with large chunks of fast moving metal. Hence, I can sometimes be found on the platform of the train station when Amtrak arrives in the evening. This Sunday I counted 11 people getting on and 23 getting off. The two engines...