If you want to write memoir, you need to set caterwauling narcissism to the side. You need to soften your stance. You need to work through the explosives—anger, aggrandizement, injustice, misfortune, despair, fumes—toward mercy. Real memoirists, literary memoirists, don’t justify behaviors, decisions, moods. They don’t ladder themselves up—high, high, high—so…
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The streets of Seville are the size of sidewalks, and there are alleys leaking off from the streets. In the back of the cab, where I sit by myself, I watch the past rushing by. I roll the smeary window down, stick out my arm. I run one finger against…
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Once I saw a vixen and a dog fox dancing. It was on the other side of the cul-de-sac, past the Gunns’ place, through the trees, where the stream draws a wet line in spring. There was old snow on the ground that day, soft and slushy, and the trees…
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From within the fissure I rise, old as anything. The gravel beneath me slides. Blueback herring and eel, alewife and shad muscle in to my wide blue heart, and through. The smudged face of a wolf pools on my surface, and for that one instant I go blind. Hemlock to…
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