In our bathroom, there’s a worn 3x5 notecard taped to the mirror that reads, “There’s an invisible string connecting me to you.” When my daughter, Hope, was five, we moved from Northern California to Austin, Texas because I had a new job as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the community college. This isn’t a small distance to cover with a tiny person, so my husband and I asked his parents to help. They flew from Maryland to collect Hope. We were immensely grateful, but we were also ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Swan of the Gods
Back in college, I unwisely took an introduction to astronomy class hoping I’d learn something mystical about the formation of stars, how they came to be named, even what secrets they could tell me about my future. The class, however, was much more interested in teaching us how to quantify the universe. It wanted to transform the time it takes to sigh into a unit and shrink the interstellar medium of planets into something like grams, but grams in terms of planets, as determined by a variety of ... [READ MORE]
The Very Last Time I Set Out to Stargaze
I’m in Joshua Tree, California, the very last time I set out to stargaze. I’ve come for the month of July to this hallucinogenic desertscape inland of Los Angeles, where my goal is to disconnect from daily life. Oneness with the universe and all that. As a debut author, I’ve been spooked by too much attention, and so I look up and think about how good it is to disappear into these constellations, so far from human concerns. This is one of the last nights I see the stars in California. Two ... [READ MORE]
The North
My uncle was driving us north, where the enemy planes hadn’t yet attacked. He took turns drinking from a bottle with the man sitting up front. My parents and I were squeezed in the back. My mother closed her eyes and held me close. My father kept biting his lips. “Drink up,” my uncle said, passing the bottle to my father. My father returned the bottle untouched. Everybody else we knew had already left the city. My uncle was the only person still in town with a car. I didn’t know why we ... [READ MORE]
Less Than Five Miles from Home
My mother and I were heading north out of Marathon, Florida, in the middle of the night, everything we owned in the back of the car. I was thirteen, and she was driving. We were coming off an overseas bridge when someone screamed from the opposite side of the street. I glanced left for a second—a woman, long black hair, white tank top, she might have had her hands to her mouth, or I might have made that up afterward—before looking back at the road, just in time to see whatever it was we were ... [READ MORE]
Karst
He wakes in the landscape of his childhood, the karst. The house is surrounded by stone that dissolves in water, limestone that becomes fissured and hazardous because of its own weakness. The clints are the parts left standing. Grykes are the absences between. It is in the grykes you find life: hart’s tongue fern, butterfly orchid, primrose. Sheltering in the sinkholes. This is a place of constant change. Changing stone. Changing light. As a child, he would go out at morning and all around ... [READ MORE]