Kablooey is the Sound You\u27ll Hear

then plaster falling and the billow of gypsum after your sister blows a hole in the ceiling of your brother\u27s bedroom with the shotgun he left loaded and resting on his dresser..

Some Things About That Day

The placards I walked through. The wet raincoat on a hook. The questionnaire on a clipboard placed before me. Couples sat around me in the waiting room. They were young. What am I saying? I was only thirty-two

Those Desirable Things

My copy of A Room of One\u27s Own is old, purchased used in the university bookstore I attended in the 1980s. In the years since, it\u27s been pushed deep into the corner of the shelf by other books-Rich, Lorde, Kristeva, Cixous. A small book, it holds down the dusty edge

Nil Ductility

Time now to wonder about Bryce who sold laminated timber beams out of his Fargo office, the old growth forested in Oregon and East Glacier..

Silos

ground zero we believed we were ground zero north dakota, 1964..

Refusing Nostalgia: On Geographical Flight and Cultural Amnesia

As a child, I was a map gazer. I\u27d set my small finger down in Alsace, in that blessed valley of castles, church spires, vineyards, and rolling fields of sunflowers between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine river, then I\u27d tramp my fingers like a small scissors eastward through Germany. I\u27d touch down on the shore of the Danube and trace its long artery, the eastern route my ancestors took in 1803 to reach Odessa on the Black Sea. I longed to feel under my fingertips the slow progress of the overland caravan, the teams of oxen, the pots and pans, the crying babies-a 1,900 mile journey-just to reach the acres of unbroken steppe land near the Black Sea that had been offered to my ancestors by Czar Alexander I

News Flash

One cape yellow diamond, octahedron-shaped, 235 carats, was found in the Schmidstdrift mine, an alluvial riverbed outwash near Kimbereley, South Africa by a three-week-old start up company named Nare Diamonds Limited who re-opened..

Tell it Cool: On Restraint in Writing

For years, I\u27ve encouraged students to tell it cool when narrating a tale that is harrowing or emotional. A cool narrator can be a buoy in rough waters. I\u27ve always thought this advice came from Hemingway, but at this moment as I search my bookshelves for the place where Hemingway said it, I can\u27t put my finger on the quote. I know it\u27s in there somewhere, likely in one of the letters (bossy letters full of unsolicited advice and signed Papa when friends were just writing to ask for money)..