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You feel pretty buttoned up. Your writing workshop is coming together like a dream. Twenty-two people. A small city tucked into the mountains of Mexico. You spend months organizing the hotel, the shuttles, sending emails back and forth with participants, extolling the...

Because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have met the woman with the large telescope in the street one night, selling us a glance at the moon for 50 pesos. And how far 50 pesos can take you in this town - all the way to the moon, or just a taxi ride up the hill to where my...

It started with the young man working in the post office who, when I asked him how he was, looked up at me with bright eyes and said, “I”m evolving.” And how I cocked my head and wondered if he were speaking to me directly, like some bodhisattva planted in the post...

My 84-year-old mother, Suzy, is getting a basketball hoop put in her driveway. Not for the grandkids, not for her neighbors, but for herself. She came to this decision in therapy last week when she figured out why she’d been so blue this past year. “I need to find my...

“Life in the liminal state asks us to carry a heavier mental load,” Dhruv Khullar, from an article in The New Yorker, August 22, 2021. We’re Inventing New Weather. That’s what my friend Nan said to me the other day. “We’re inventing new weather,” she said, as she made...

It’s all in the frame. That’s what my friend Nan said when I told her about the car accident last week, the way I barreled into the intersection, the collapse of the cars, the older Asian man who emerged from his vehicle intact. It’s all in the frame, she said, how I...

1. Almost all the sounds are yours. And the ones that aren’t - the dry crunch of leaves along the side of the house, they’re either animal or man. Man is the heavier step, the raccoon and the possum are more tentative, more low to the leaves. And if you’re scared, you...

It’s been hard to write full pieces this year, instead I must offer you the smallest things ... The slice of lemon cheesecake bought on Friday to eat on Easter Sunday - in a white box in the refrigerator - and the way I cut the sheerest slices from it each night...

One of the interesting parts of my work, and the work of anyone who works for themself, is sharing it with the world, marketing it. You can create a beautiful offering, but if you don’t let people know about it you’ll be the only one at the party. This is what I was...