Surfacing
“Here is something I have hidden from you this whole time, something settled in the spaces between these words, something you have not been able to detect: I am not alone here.” An essay from close to...
View ArticleThe Yellow Flowers
“I have only minutes. In all likelihood, I will never return here.” An essay from the trilogy of Holocaust essays in Hallow This Ground, this one about the memorial at the Treblinka death camp. The...
View ArticleReflecting Mirror: Orlando, the Day After
“Each name is golden, bright.” An essay about the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center, and part of Hallow This Ground. Originally published in the anthology Tuscaloosa Runs This, a collection of...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town”
“She claimed she had no talent for song, but as the miles of the interstate slipped by on our return to our home, I loved the sound of her voice more than anything else in this world.” Originally...
View ArticleBoys Least Likely To
“I thought about the ghosts I’d made, words I’d lost. No eye could see me, but I was visible in every mind, hunting. We were all for the furnace anymore.” An essay about the shootings at Columbine High...
View ArticleThe Meridian Hotel
“We are drinking tea in the lobby of the Meridian Hotel. We are measuring from this spot.” A breakthrough essay for me, written six years ago. Not connected to any project, but as obsessed with history...
View Article#388: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto
“No one who worked in Music thought the job was cool, but most everyone who worked in Music was cool.” From Brad Efford’s amazing The RS 500, a literary journal using Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest...
View Article“Hallow This Ground” sneak preview!
You know how there’s that moment in movies where they say the title, and you go, oh, that’s it! That’s the title! They’ll say something like “I can’t believe this Midnight Madness!” or “I sure am...
View ArticleFour Sentences on Failure (#16) and Warp and Weft (#17)
Two presidents in a single post–seems natural, since one follows another. My essay on Abraham Lincoln, “Four Sentences on Failure (#16),” appears in this year’s issue of The Evansville Review–just five...
View Article#317: Surfer Rosa
Over at Brad Efford’s incredible RS 500 project, I wrote on one of my favorite albums from high school, Surfer Rosa, by the Pixies. Thanks to Brad for taking an essay I wrote on my phone in a...
View Article
