The Little Chairs
The men in my family are gone. My uncle, a software programmer for IBM who made the same Thanksgiving dinner every year since 1987 from a menu in Esquire,...
How much does the audience get to know?
And yet on the other hand, being a memoir writer apparently, to a lot of people, means that your entire personal life is fair game. Because...
The Past in Nonfiction
Suzanne Berne writes about her search for a grandmother she never knew, a mother her father never knew: her grandmother died when her father was a little...
An interview with Mary Roach
Roach: "The whole wall behind his desk was filled with television screens of eyes that were currently being operated on! So, I’m trying to interview him, and behind...
On the Music of Distraction
The pitch of the accordion begins low in the dark, but as the spotlight slowly focuses, I see the bellows of the instrument open up, the top ahead of...
I’d Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff
Today, in leafing through a bundle of letters to Kyrgyzstan, postmarked in Colorado, a sense of guilt begins to build. The feeling that I abandoned this...
When You Told Me It Wasn’t a Honeymoon
So we stayed on the trail and followed it down through the brush and over a rushing stream with soaked stones the color of chicken skin. Above us, the...
A Final Infidelity
In the end, there is just me: a twenty-nine year old Minnesota Man careening along the interstate, heading back east to Saint Paul on a humid August Friday...
Third Molars
They emerged in the spring: three little newborn pockets of wisdom that did not settle into place until June. In the time between they rose to the height of...
Ohio
1. Go into bathroom 2. Lights on 3. Shut door 4. Lock door 5. Tie back hair 6. Take off glasses, if wearing 7. Take off shirt 8. Take off rings on right...