Category: Essays

“And how are your kids?” Mr. Corrales was asking me. As one of my long-term patients, Mr. Corrales had been following my life for the past decade, as I had been...

 [U]nder such a government as this, [people] think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them… Let your life be a counter...

I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey” It’s January in the middle of Iowa; you’re finding your footin...

Wild dogs, song dogs, pad and sniff and shit. Humans trudge through ocotillo and creosote bush, prickly pear and mesquite. We climb to a field of outcropping an...

In the summer of 1988, I was a stringer working the copy desk at the Associated Press West Africa bureau in Cote d’Ivoire. One afternoon I answered the phone to...

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma...

From the get-go I insisted that the tombstone had to say Grace. Not Lois or even Lois G – the way it appeared on the paper mock-up my parents first showed me—bu...

  My mother used to say she hated wind.  I’ve found myself saying it too, whether from internal iterations of her or from genuine dislike, I’m not sur...

1 Rainy and cool, as April often is, with new snow in the mountains. My wife Cara and I have come to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to join a group of writer...

I watched the training video at a desk wedged between two metal racks of summer sweaters waiting to be tagged and taken to the floor. The store room was cold an...