Month: September 2017

  • My Rat

    My Rat

    I was at war with a rat for four months. It was a losing battle; nearly every morning for sixteen weeks, we woke to half-eaten bananas and apples, their skins punctured a hundred times with pin-sized incisors and the flesh eaten out. The rat liked symmetry: the hole was a perfect O. He burrowed into […]

  • Mexico, My Mexico

    Mexico, My Mexico

    The woman, in her fifties, had draped a black, webbed veil over her head. Her dress might have been from Sears, bought at a thrift store, but the scarf around her neck was from a thousand years of Nahuatl stitching. Her skin was Oaxacan-brown, with the native folds in her cheeks. She clenched her hands […]

  • The First Journal

    The First Journal

    Her name was Nancy. She was beautiful. Light auburn hair, slim build, hazel eyes and a smile, oh that smile. She was new to Knoxville Catholic High School, somewhere from the north. Her family had moved to Tennessee that summer, so she didn’t have our accent. She came to us in her senior year. All […]

  • The Ache for Narrative

    The Ache for Narrative

    I’ve spent a lot of life looking back. This wasn’t always the case; Michelle reminds me that, in our twenties, I was the guy who said “Fuck the past, I’m all about the now!” We were living exciting lives. It was the 80’s. Central America and Ronald Reagan were in the news every night. Michelle […]

  • Reading and empathy

    Here’s a lovely article on how literary fiction plays a fundamental role in developing the skill of empathy. It’s the antithesis of the brutality of a Troll-Nation. Scientific American Magazine