In memory of Rev. Dr. Travis DuPriest (1944 – 2021)When I learned that Rev. Dr. DuPriest had died, I felt sorrow and that exquisite little spark of anguish that always flickers and stings when we look upon the distant past – the far away corners, the furthest past, the past when we, ourselves were newer, rawer, more innocent, more...
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Photo by Heather Gruber. My sister, in town from Chicago for the first time in two years, caught this moment I shared with my students during the Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy Commencement ceremony. We did what we’d been doing for a long time: we held each other up. Outside of pictures like this one, I snapped very few photographs during...
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Dear Graduating Class of 2021 (but quite specifically Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy graduating class of 2021), I see you. You are brilliant. I love you. Remember this: if you were my student, at any point, you are always my student. What that means is that I want to hear from you, hear about you, and that I will carry you always in the lake of my...
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Unthinkable. This is a word I have returned to often—in the past 15 months—when “unprecedented” just didn’t cut it. Let’s face it, if the empty ubiquity of the word “unprecedented” has taught us anything this year, it has taught us that the English language is still very much in its infancy. So I lean into “unthinkable.” Not even the inherently negative...
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Education has become a political flashpoint. The grownups are arguing; at the center of the argument lies the stinking, rotting carcass of American education. Last Friday, Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy (a place I’m proud to call home as an educator) held an all-school assembly that centered issues impacting Black, Indigenous and People of Color...
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As I write this, the US Capitol is still under siege by a group of American terrorists who were provoked by the words and actions (or inactions) of a small-minded conman who managed to slither his way into the Oval Office. Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday in Washington. Photo by Jose Luis Magana/AP I...
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When Sarah and I talked about places to live, if not Flagstaff (we loved Flag, but were reluctant to fully commit), I, naturally, wanted to return to Chicago—to green, to Lake Michigan, heavy thunderstorms, brutally cold winters, my sister, my parents, so many friends and extended family. Sarah always proposed Tucson, her hometown. (Funny how we’re partial...
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Toward winter’s end, it became difficult to listen to music. My world and the whole damn world had changed, was changing, so rapidly. Music, which has brought me comfort in some of my darkest hours, just wasn’t cutting it—every song a reminder of a life before. Even the songs I heard for the first time last September, when we took the kids on a trip to Los...
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I remember learning to swim. I think I was five. We were in Sanibel Island, Florida. My father and grandfather put me in water wings and made me paddle from one to the other as they distanced themselves further apart, like human goal posts. I was eager to ditch the inflatable cuffs. In the water I felt safe, which is a feeling I seldom feel anymore. Water,...
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Last week, I said goodbye to my seniors, the class of 2020. We gathered, social-distance-style, at the Coconino County Fairgrounds. Graduates and their families decked out their cars like parade floats, tailgated with cake and sandwiches, and at the end of the evening each family turned on their headlights so graduates could step out of vehicles and throw...
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Last Friday night, as I brushed my teeth, I heard loud music playing from a neighbor’s apartment and lifted open the bathroom window to put my face to the night air, my ears to the music. I couldn’t make out the song, but the sound was so close to the old normal I could hardly pull myself away. When everything changes, we become myopically drawn to what we...
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I have to be honest: this lingering cold is beginning to concern me. I’m starting to doubt my own conservative assumptions about just how much toilet paper we actually need. Dread is encroaching. Last week, at my wife’s insistence, in the middle of a snow squall, we made our way to the grocery store to “stock up on supplies.” We bought cereal and canned...
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In January, I was diagnosed with recurrent, metastatic, stage 4 breast cancer. Nine years ago, in Milwaukee, I felt relieved to only be stage 2, to only be halfway. However, from that day until last month, as I sat in a doctor’s office with a view of the Sedona red rocks, I expected stage 4 would someday come. After the diagnosis, despite my advanced...
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By the time this article posts, I will know whether or not I have cancer. I enjoy teaching my students about writing hooks. Sometimes, albeit rarely, the moment you’re living in provides the best possible hook. I’ve also told students who wish to write, “Start with where you are right now.” So for this piece, I’m starting where I am right now: waiting....
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This week, I wanted to write about snow, but I didn’t want to sit with my own snow thoughts and so I enlisted the wisdom of my Intro to Creative Writing class, which consists of students ranging from eighth grade to senior year in high school. Most, though not all, have lived in Flagstaff all their lives. I knew they’d have some insight on the matter....
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What used to scare me: the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, that part in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazi’s face melted off, escalators at the Woodfield Mall. These days, I’m scared by far more terrifying, albeit everyday, forces, but I do like Halloween, arriving precisely when hoodies and extra blankets are warranted. My students are passionate...
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We’re fostering kittens again. My wife is passionate about cats. In one of the first pictures I saw of her as a child, she’s proudly hugging a resigned Siamese to her little body. Without solicitation, she shows people pictures of our cats the way proud parents might show pictures of their children. While there are people who genuinely hate dogs (or fear...
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When I was in second grade, I had a teacher, an energetic, funny, charismatic woman beloved by all her students, who used to routinely sing us a few lines from “On the Sunny Side of the Street”: “Grab your coat/ get your hat/ leave your worry on the doorstep . . .” This past week, my second grade teacher passed away and folks from my class (all of us now...
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I love to travel, but I am a nervous flyer. While I’m not an engineer, or a math person, or even a science person, the principles of flight make sense to the logical part of my brain. It’s the primal part that can’t fathom the act. When I was a toddler there was a terrible plane crash at O’Hare. All 271 people onboard were killed, as well as a few people...
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Two weeks ago, my grandmother died. She was almost 94. Her death was not a tragedy, not unexpected, but as with all deaths, it was a painful loss, so although it was the second-to-last week of school, I flew to the Midwest to attend services. When I go to Chicago, I usually say, “I’m going home.” However, I’ve spent the last five years in the Southwest and...
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As I pull weeds from the garden beds that, last year, yielded a handful of arugula and four withered peas, I tell my wife, “Maybe it will be different this time.” In the 1989 film adaptation of Pet Sematary, this is the same line the main character repeats to himself and God as he buries one body after the next in the haunted graveyard, only to finally,...
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When I was a little girl, my step-grandfather made my siblings and me small cedar chests with bronze hinges. I’ve kept mine. Ever since I left home for college, it’s moved with me. Inside are decades of concert ticket stubs (Violent Femmes, Blur, Morrissey), postcards from Wisconsin, Bali, France, notes from friends that date back to my junior year in high...
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My wife calls them “smallidays”—small holidays, St. Patrick’s Day, Labor Day, Valentine’s Day. Last month, as I glumly removed ornaments and got ready to chuck our tree, she reminded me, “There’s still a bunch of smallidays to look forward to…” This was little comfort as I haven’t put stock in those holidays since I was a kid. Most years I don’t even...
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Over winter break I spent some time listening to a podcast and reading a book about The Donner Party. While I would like to say I became spontaneously interested in Westward Expansion or the notion of Manifest Destiny, the truth is a friend made a reference to the Donner Party during a conversation and I was reminded of this little American History blip...
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Last week was World AIDS Day, it snowed in Flagstaff, George H.W. Bush died and my AP Literature class began reading Tony Kushner’s Angels in America — a play about AIDS, ancestry, politics, community, America itself. The present moment often has a way of colliding with my curriculum. About this, I feel conflicted. On one hand, my students and I...
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When the rain stops falling in the Catalina Foothills, my father-in-law takes me outside to smell creosote. He gestures broadly to the vast desert before us: “All that’s glistening is creosote,” he says, and leans over the adobe wall bordering his property, picks a small clump of leaves from a tree, puts them to my nose. “Smell that.” As I’m inhaling...
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While he drove me and my brother to school, my father listened to traffic reports. The newscasters spoke so fast their words smeared together and I always heard, “Inbound on the outbound Kennedy you’re looking at an hour five,” causing me, from an early age, to believe (somewhat correctly) that navigating the Chicago expressway system was one of life’s...
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