I wanted to win an award of distinction at the writers’ conference I just attended. I sat at the banquet table in a plush chair that wooed me into feeling regally pampered, alongside the braised meat entrée and pasta that could double in richness as dessert. As the presenter passed through the [...]

My birthday is late November and so often in my life has been crowded out by Thanksgiving – the day and extended weekend holiday. While the adults around me were reflective about their blessings, not needing more than the turkey and fixings, I was usually entirely insatiate. I wanted [...]

On my sixteenth birthday I was living in Switzerland, attending an American boarding school. I played center on the basketball team, and we had an away tournament in Florence. It sounds romantic, timeless, enchanted, and had that potential, for sure, influenced by the city’s lauded architecture [...]

My mother has lived in her car for the past twenty years – off and on. Sometimes she had a place for a year, sometimes a week. She’s homeless. She housesits and dog-walks and writes a column for the newspaper in Malibu where she ‘moved’ so she could be nearer to her idol, Bob Dylan. […]

San Francisco, 1992 I decided to throw bottles at the wall in the park. The park is small, mostly a pick up scene for gay men who let their dogs tear up and down its two block spread of balding lawn. I have counted sixteen dogs there at once, most of them forming a high […]

I I am a fish gliding along the reef of madness. But I do not think that at the time. I think instead that I am dolphinesque, slipping through water the color of somebody’s eyes. No. At the time, I am a child, and the thoughts in my mind are: That was at least a […]