When I was a freshman in college, I decided to memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was a weird year for me. I was living in a converted lounge, the best the formerly all-male college could do to accommodate its new female students. My dorm room had a beige linoleum floor, stark white walls, no windows, and two bunk beds placed randomly in...
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It’s been 270 million years since Flagstaff might have advertised itself as a beach destination. Not the kind with vendors and umbrellas, boardwalks and roller bladers, people large and small squirming with sunburn and spilling out of their swimsuits. No humans—no mammals at all—no birds, not even dinosaurs roamed these shores. The ocean’s evidence is...
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My first day in prison went better than I expected. The guards were patient with me, even when I was stuck for several minutes in a sort of no man’s land between two heavy doors, a security zone with cameras set too high to record the presence of a five-foot tall person. It took some jumping and waving on my part to activate the inside door, and by then I...
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The story goes that my sister Julia, newly arrived at UC Santa Cruz, was sitting in class on the afternoon of October 17, 1989, when the ground began to tremble. The class was a large lecture class and Julia watched in amazement as dozens of her fellow PhD students jumped up from their seats and ran for the doorways. Believing it was nothing but the rumble...
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I missed a big chunk of first grade because I was laid up with tuberculosis. As a result, by the time I hit second grade I could barely write my name. Everyone else in the class, I noticed, published themselves every chance they got. In blocky letters they scrawled their names across the blackboard, chalked them on the benches in the playground and on the...
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