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...
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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...
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We were away when the shooting happened. We were perhaps listening to Annette McGivney read from her fine new book about a murder in Havasu Canyon, Pure Land or hearing Four Cornered Room play sweet melodies or watching a funny feminist-liberation scene from the Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was lively at the...
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Time was when a bunch of trees waving their branches overhead was enough. I’d lie on my back, on the lawn, and watch the clouds catch in and release from their branches. That was enough to pass a summer afternoon. The trees, in my case, were Midwestern oaks, ashes, maples, but that didn’t really matter; it was a timeless occupation, a fullness that...
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This much is true: it was another year when the world was going to hell. 1939. Over in Europe, the Nazis were buzzing like a nest of stirred-up hornets soon to boil over their neighbors. In the Pacific, the Japanese were off on their own adventures in conquest. But in Flagstaff, J.A. Bostwick was rendering a peaceful landscape. I don’t have the full...
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