“There is no there there.” ~ Gertrude Stein “There is.” ~ Laura Kelly I am one of the nearly six million Americans in the past week who zipped a suitcase, lumbered through security, double checked my boarding pass and wedged my posterior into an airplane seat so I could fly somewhere. The end of every year means this annual marquee holiday with...
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Last Tuesday, 23 of us sat around a sturdy conference table in the middle of our university classroom. It was my biweekly Advanced Writing for Media class, and the upcoming assignment: food memoir. Each student was to write a 1,000-word personal story about eating or cooking or something about food. Glorious food. Before the story writing was the...
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The news broke earlier this month on a Sunday. Viktoria Marinova, an investigative journalist, had been killed in Ruse, Bulgaria, a city in the northeast corner of this country. The Danube, on its epic flow, runs through Ruse. Bulgaria is on the river’s southern bank; Romania is to the north. Marinova’s death had been brutal, and the hypotheses swirled....
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In August I sold my car Thor to a friend’s daughter who lives in Salem, Oregon. I offered to drive Thor to her doorstep, envisioning a nostalgic road trip punctuated with serendipity and fertile solitude. I had begun my cross-country drive-a-thon earlier in the summer when I flew into Miami Beach, where I had deposited Thor before returning to the...
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In our fridge, the shelves lining the door are colonized by condiments. Shelf after shelf of condiments. The condiments jostle for limited real estate, obscure their labels behind the plastic railings that corral them into place and rattle a glass-on-glass chorus when the door is opened. Sound familiar? The rest of the fridge holds food from 2018. But the...
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