It is early afternoon, pleasantly warm, and I am lying on my blanket in the grass at Frognerparken, the largest city park in Oslo. My pale legs and arms are bare to the sun. It warms me. I can feel it pouring brightly over the crown of my hair, especially…
If I'm not careful, I'll catch myself writing.
Image via Wikipedia If I'm not careful, I'll catch myself writing. I will be swept by the spotlights of my conscious mind, and the hazards of the terrain will be magnified. Second-guessed words, phrases twisted rather than turned. Clichés will loom before me, like serpents in my garden, begging to…
Velkommen til Oslo!
Yesterday we arrived in Norway. All together. Two humans, two cats, six bags. Somehow we managed to lug everything from customs to the airport train station, from the Nationaltheatret station to the taxi stand, from the taxi up five flights of stairs. Twenty-four hours of constant motion culminated in the…
Check the Antifreeze: A Craft Annotation
Venturing into the wilderness at any point in life will have an impact on one's personality and lifestyle. It is always an adventure, and it is always dangerous. When Rick Bass and his then girlfriend Elizabeth rode their truck over a severely rutted road into the outback of northern Montana,…
Nouveau-riche Blue: A Craft Annotation
Whether painting for his reader a train's boxcar or a rare butterfly, Vladimir Nabokov handles the description with precision. He wields his weighty vocabulary like the sharpest of pencils and sketches every detail of the object in question. I could see the segmented panes of glass in the doors on…
A Sputnik Moment
Tonight I heard my President call for America to respond to a "Sputnik moment." It was, in a sense, a call to arms. I liked this call. In October of 1957, Russian scientists launched a beach ball-sized satellite into space in a move that rocked this country and kicked off…
Relocating
Somewhere there is a plane buzzing across an azure sky, a big one. It shuttles people across oceans, countries, continents. Most of those people are merely traveling, and having been one of them fairly frequently over the past six years, I envy them both the journey and the return home.…
The Stinging-Dry Song of Grasshoppers: A Craft Annotation
The cover of the current edition of Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is split down the middle by a vaguely tribal design, the title to the right and a black and white baby picture of the author on the left. Young Bobo Fuller's mouth is wide…