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Sunken Town
The blaze that engulfed my hometown began before I was born. It began with the first dry leaf from the first almond tree they planted on the side of the town hall road. My mom planted it as a child, around carnival time, the year when her dad the Mayor decided that the town would…
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To Proclaim a Dying World
“A museum setting might sterilize the dread of the inevitable ending at which any chronological exhibit explicitly in conversation with environmentalism must arrive. But the accessibility of this juxtaposition right up front makes sure one is clued into that inevitability and made to feel it violently.”
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Shadow-boxers
Here’s how I saw De Quincey High then: stained bathroom walls; pregnant girls; boys with knives and guns and bandanas; teachers with fear so engrained that it folded into their faces in wrinkles; a gym that could have been a prison; a cafeteria that was one; cheap lipstick and cheaper condoms; a dirt track; fences.
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I had a cough all my life. It stood by my side.
Near dusk, we owe an appropriate fear to the light that may not show on the hilly back of the morning beast. Mother takes our picture at sunset. Her finger pushing and begging that button to hold everything still, appeases us. Thus the wind is captured into an airtight frame, to be developed at will,…
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Quite the Fourth
1 Black night sky pierced by bursting bubbles of color. Brilliance rains down on the back patio, singing blood-red bricks. Flames—leaping, dancing, hoping to escape—curl around the logs in the semi-lunar pit. Vigilant mothers reprimand squabbling children, “Don’t you dare put that sparkler in Claire’s mouth.” Fathers guzzle bottled beers, their cause a noble one;…
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Barbed Beauty
“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”
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‘Einstein, Margarita, and the Bomb’
On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of ‘Einstein and Margarita,’ a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera…
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The Marvels of Creative Writing
A week ago, I sat down with famed Princeton creative writing instructor Gabe Hudson. Aside from being loved by his students, he is an Editor-At-Large at McSweeney’s and the author of Dear Mr. President. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and The Village Voice, among other national publications.
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Libraries
In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what _Don Quixote_ was by watching the _Wishbone_ episode. It was a library then, too, but I didn’t really notice. It has shelves for walls all stuffed with books, generally…