It’s always the edges that are most interesting, the half-shadowed interface that’s not quite field and not quite forest, the crust where the dough crisps and takes on its own new texture, the border area where people mix two otherwise separate languages and cultures and foods. Just as sunrise and sunset are the most beautiful times of day, I like to think...
Read More
An egg is perfect: The flawless curve of its nacreous horizon, the shimmering gloss, so like the Earth’s atmosphere seen in photos from space, of a rounded surface that never ends but is always beginning. An egg holds all the makings for life without any of the messiness to come: The blood, the hunger, the scraggly and wet down feathers of the newborn...
Read More
Almost as regularly as cold fronts the driftwood used to come in to the beach. It was a wild mix of shapes and sizes, from sticks to logs and everything in between. Much of it was waterlogged, so heavy that as it bobbed in the frigid lake water you could scarcely spot it. But if it washed ashore on a day of waves, and if it didn’t get buried too firmly in...
Read More
During the year in which I turned 21 I lived in Germany, in Munich. Ostensibly I was taking classes at the university but in reality this was a pretty light load and so I spent as much time as I could walking the streets, marveling at how different it all was than the Suburbia Americana I knew from home. Here was the filigreed city hall, with a...
Read More
The story begins with a wolf standing by the side of the road. This isn’t the story you might think. There’s no helpless girl, no feckless pigs, no trickery. What there is, is hunger. Hunger for food, as always, and a hunger to roam. The woods are broad. Even though they are cross-stitched with fences and pocked with houses that must be avoided they extend...
Read More