Letter from Home | A collection of essays originally written for Flagstaff Live!

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Call me Hereafter; Who are we if we’re not ourselves?

Call me Hereafter; Who are we if we’re not ourselves?

Posted by on Sep 27, 2018

Dear Ms Dyssegaard, My agent, Malaga Baldi, has informed me that you are interested in my novel and its author. I am forty-eight years old, a published writer working under the pseudonym Hereafter Brown. I have never worked under a pseudonym before but the publishing climate of 2001 is different than when I began to write. As the emphasis now is on new...

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Constant in our affection; An old sailboat and the family she created

Constant in our affection; An old sailboat and the family she created

Posted by on Sep 6, 2018

The women in my family were sailors, the men fly fishermen. From fathers and grandfathers we learned the dubious art of exaggeration—“It was this long! No kidding! A shame it got away!”—useful for future con men and writers. From the women we learned the practical skills of navigation, patience and how to predict the weather. We learned to plot a course,...

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Elegy for an old house; Measuring the weight of memories

Elegy for an old house; Measuring the weight of memories

Posted by on Jul 26, 2018

The house has good bones. The morning light falls on walls and sills and floorboards, and on the old kitchen stove. Here is the kitchen table where I used to write. There’s the painted chair my friend Malaga rescued from the corner of Broadway and 92nd Street. For 200 years the house has occupied this overgrown hollow. This used to be my home on Cape Cod...

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Update from a pear-shaped planet; The story of the trees

Update from a pear-shaped planet; The story of the trees

Posted by on Jul 19, 2018

There was a forest between my grandmother’s house and the cliffs that rose from the sea. Spruce and balsam in equal share, white pine, red pine and a collection of towering hardwoods—single masts of maple and oak sailing along in an ocean of evergreens. For my purposes I needed the firs, the balsam. I’d take myself to the place where they were dominant and...

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The time of Templeton; Recollections of a glorious past

The time of Templeton; Recollections of a glorious past

Posted by on Jun 21, 2018

In the late 1950s, while American families blew up in size and the seeds of the turbulent ‘60s sprouted and began to grow, my parents went through what I call their Mini-Mammalian Period, a microcosmic span of time reminiscent of the mid-Jurassic. It was characterized by an unbridled proliferation of undersized pets, beginning with the patriarch Templeton....

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