I live in Tucson. People tell me they love the images they see on my various social media feeds of the mysterious, moonscape desert that surrounds. Many of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who follow me on social media live …
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Features
Adapted from keynote address presented at the Red Clay Writers Conference, Kennesaw, Georgia, 9 November 2019
Southern literary giant Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 in pre–Civil Rights Louisiana. There was no high school for him to attend there …
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GOOGLE DOCS, AN AIRPLANE / MONTREAL, CHICAGO, AND AUSTIN /
3:10 P.M. CENTRAL TIME, 2 DECEMBER 2019.
People shoplift citizenship like it’s a mink stole rather than a spiked choker, a freedom from a failed idea or a drive toward …
Read MoreI had found the perfect way to stop grinding my teeth and tearing my hair out over my client’s recalcitrance toward the fourteen calls I had made to her in two weeks. She had still not brought me the document …
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In the isolated rural South, the arrival of a stranger often elicits both fear and excitement. That is why, nearly fifty years later, I remember so clearly the day an unknown woman in a sensible shirtwaist dress drove down our …
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Before they took Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, the British described it as a “barren rock with hardly a house upon it.” Now it is a place of tremendous height and stone, worthy of Sisyphus’s fruitless toil. The colonial …
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There was a story in the village of Bjni that went like this: When Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, there were two types of people—Armenian A, who sold his Soviet state-subsidized goat, spent all his money, and …
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The first twenty minutes in line outside the bathhouse sound like thunder. The Broncos have just played—maybe won—at Mile High Stadium, and if it weren’t for a block of four-story apartment buildings we ’d be looking down on the city …
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When the sun goes down you move
horizontal you become everything
in the world at once rather than waking
like vertical where you obsess over
ascend or descend or whatever rain
at the edge of the building spit forth
