Category: Essays

Because nobody spoke of my grandmother, Maxine, when I was a child, I pieced together the day of her death from fragments I had heard, as if I had been there—a ...

  I call it the Marksburg photo, even though Marksburg, the castle on the mountain behind the two of us, is almost unnoticeable. I once mounted a section o...

The lights in here are too bright, and they too brightly brighten the blue dish detergent, the deodorant that apparently makes one smell like a meadow in spring...

The marketing agency I work at is meeting with a local business owner in this small but increasingly optimistic Rust Belt town. We talk about packaging. They ma...

The moon shone on stacked thatching grass and a hyena cried. It was May and I’d returned to Dibangombe. Allan greeted me with his usual laughter and sardonic qu...

   When my daughter and I pilgrimage together, we see dead things. Not intentionally, mind you. We are not visiting reliquary, morgue, or cemetery but...

One: Meet guilt, your new best friend. Guilt will be there for you during difficult times: at 2am, for instance, when you don’t know where your twenty-four-year...

People lose things when they move. Losing things is my habitual worry and a worrisome habit. This, I think, is one reason for science’s relentless struggle to c...

My mother was leaving to run some errands and she invited me to go along. My father, Guv, was tying his shoes, about to leave for a tennis match, and I was torn...

How strange the air. How strange this place. Austere facades of tall stucco buildings meet the sidewalk at sharp right angles. Tall narrow windows occlude light...