Kinds of love (after Gon Ben Ari): The love of the sound of language. The love of the shapes formed by one’s tongue in creating the sounds of language. The love of English. The love of one’s toes when they are freshly painted in a new color. The love of discovering new words. This week: […]

As a writing student I learned the maxim, “Know your audience.” I understand its logic but even now, a decade into my career as a writer, I’m still vaguely baffled about what to do with it. I still think, as I did at first, “How am I supposed to know who my audience is?” It […]

My favorite time to write is in the middle of the night. Correct that: My favorite time to write memoir is in the middle of the night. Late, late at night, always between 2 and 5 a.m. It happens that I generally go to bed at about 11 p.m. and I seem to have a […]

I have conjured my brother. He is a composite, inhabiting the uncountable hours I spent in youth feeling his presence at the other end of the couch while we read or watched TV or played video games or just hung out and tormented the cat. Here is my father’s living room in fine detail—the cool […]

Monday night yoga leaves me feeling so good that I rarely want to go home afterward—back to my house of anxiety and wormholes, to the confused pressure that has become as familiar to me as air. The pressure to write, to order the chaos inside my mind. Downtown Tucson is mellow on Mondays, so when […]

Possessing a disorganized mind, I do what I must to keep my life in order, labeling files and jotting down lists as I go through my day. But ordering my free time would feel like sheer nonsense. I’m simply not capable of doing it. Blissfully, Monday night yoga releases me from that responsibility. Once a […]

Contents of the writer’s “office,” which is actually one corner of the master-bedroom suite: 1) Non-writing Desk—retained from childhood, pine, recently refinished in “honey pine” and accented with ceramic knobs purchased from Anthropologie. Used solely as surface on which to place reading materials. Items associated with non-writing desk: Two stacks of about ten paper-back books […]

Watching footage of Los Angeles’s streets at night, despite the caché of their claim as the birthplace of film noir, it is hard not to ask: Why would anyone choose to live this way? Without walking? I have considered as much while trying, often failing, to walk around in the town I live in—Tucson, Arizona, […]

This means walking city streets, alone. Nature is lovely of course but I don’t find enough there to look at that inspires me, and it is too still to promote the right flow of thoughts—no people. In a city the slow, steady movement around me, and of my own limbs, releases my mind to wander […]