Tag: memoir
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You Don’t Have to Have a Merry Christmas
The darkest evening of the year was yesterday, though for most people, it was just the longest evening of the year. Winter solstice. The shortest day. Here, in L.A., dusk came along around 4:30. That’s too soon for me. Going to bed has, for nearly forty years, been a reckoning with the shadow that comes…
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The Things They Tell You Not to Write About
Our morning begins with the clack of the walker’s brakes a wall away from where I sit here writing—that specific clunk of two handles lifted to release the wheels. But for her, it began an hour ago, waking up, looking at the ceiling of her bedroom, deciding whether or not to rise. It’s a painful…
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My Guns, Part 2: My Blackbirds
I was both a city and country mouse, living between my father’s deep-Appalachian world of sharecroppers, hunters, and, yes, moonshine, and the bustling metropolis of Rogersville, Tennessee, population around 5,100. I grew up in a small, middle-class suburb on the edge of town, a place where people kept their grass cut and their children played…
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My Guns, Part 1
I don’t remember Dad handing me my first rifle. I do remember killing my first rabbit. It was winter, I’d just turned nine, so, in Appalachian thought, I was two years late. It was time to kill something. But Dad hadn’t put pressure on me. We were walking through four inches of snow in a…
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A Weaponry of Journals
I’m dipping into my journals in order to write about writing, looking for the notes on old manuscripts to see what tricks of the trade I’ve used through the years. It’s an interesting journey, to read what you wrote twenty-five, thirty years ago. It’s not always pretty; a journal is the place we turn to,…