Category: Non-Fiction

Books are gentle companions. Generally. I was only just about murdered by books on one occasion. That was fifteen years ago… * I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I had no prospects. I had an arts degree. I started reading a fair bit. More than usual. I read for ten to twelve…

The weather forecasters called it an Arctic Dome, but those of us who lived in northwestern Wyoming that winter pronounced it colder than a well digger’s behind.  For seven days the mercury in our thermometer never ventured above zero, even at high noon.  Snow squeaked beneath our boots.  Ice draped windows so thickly one had…

The river stands still, a mirror for the full night sky and the clouds passing, turning by degrees from black to gray to flat white as they move in front of the moon and take in her light.  Even the river’s main channel, the parent bed over whose banks the water poured when power dams…

                                                                                 Three Sandhill cranes landed, framed by the fading grey oak of the pasture fence. The…

We had never been inside such a place. We didn’t know why the owner was so angry. He yelled at our buddy Rob to stop filming. Rob slid the VHS recorder off his shoulder, swinging the bulky video camera like a lunch box, and stepped outside. He shot different footage. Once we left this city,…

This is my hometown: Mansfield, Ohio, rated “Worst City to Live in North America” by Places Rated Almanac of 1996, the year I graduated high school. Population: 47,000, though that keeps falling. General Motors left. Before that: Westinghouse, Mansfield Tire & Rubber Company, Ohio Brass, Tappan, Armco Steel. My town is a town of abandonment,…

Mrs. Condell�s hair is a fizz of gray and blond, like yellow chalk that�s been left on the board too long. She wears a pale pink v-neck blouse that slides slowly underneath her breasts when she walks the hallways of the elementary school, and her tiny red Keds don�t squeak. As I sat in the…

Benjamin Britten heard a bomb in Suffolk. He heard the graveled burst, the field golden green, whole, then not. Or perhaps what he heard was muffled, the grate of steel wool together, the scrubbing of pots. He knew though, the eventual composer, the someday lord, that he heard the explosion, his first remembered sound. In…

Reading my writing aloudand I write primarily fiction and personal essayshas always been part of the drill for me. Its the penultimate or even ultimate stage in my obligatory revision/rewriting sequence: from the initial handwritten drafts; through revisions on screen, with their multiple font and type-size permutations; to several printed versions at the end.I once…