I traveled between France and the United States every summer, and in France I was beautiful, and in America I was ugly and people told me so. Beauty as a cultur...
I never thought of our river as hungry until it swallowed Schafer whole, until he breathed water instead of air. He and some friends doused themselves in Jim Be...
Before my wife and I got married, my mother told me that my father had expressed concern about my future brother in law’s gayness being passed along to our chil...
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
Right in the middle of some everyday activity, I’m overtaken by a sense of joy, peace, or contentment. The window often closes up just as quickly as it has ope...
In a second union, things you took for granted during those years with your first spouse float in your unconscious like twigs along a clear or muddied stream, o...
Life with Dad was an endless game. We shot candles out of Mother's silver candelabra on the picnic table. I learned to drive racing the jeep around hay bales in...
Only when the moon rises do I see it, see her—the glint of silver and then green and silver, the flash of scales. Only then do I know: my mother is a mermaid, a...
Does it start with what damaged him—a father who only survived starvation in a series of Japanese POW camps because he was a natural scientist, a botanist, who ...
He waited until after we had made love for the first time to reveal his age. He was thirty-six years older than me. I knew he was older, but this confession too...
How does one find self-worth standing before the evidence of broken dreams, unrealized potential, and past mistakes? This is what plagued me as I stared at the ...
I’m not sure if my mistake was in joining together reality and fantasy or if I simply was treading someplace where I didn’t belong.
