Nonfiction

After a late-night supper and Spanish chatter garnished with English, the women of my family would retire to the bedroom where my grandmother would be transformed from an old woman with wobbly arms into a seer who could shine light on the present and tell you about your future using the Baraja Española, the Spanish

  1. “I can pick up my pistol tomorrow,” my brother says. “It’s so badass.” His words slide off the plate of our conversation like leftovers. “I’m on my way to grandmother’s house to buy an onion.” This is a drug reference. I shift the phone from one ear to the other, the ridges of

“We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them,

I knew when a car was rounding the bend to my Granddaddy’s house. Swirling clouds of red clay and the echo of tires straining to navigate the rocky road always preceded a car’s presence. I’d run in my bare feet to the peach tree that resided midway up Granddaddy’s driveway to spot who was coming.

J is for June 21, the summer solstice, the day the summer sun lingers longest in the sky and bonfires burn on beaches, the day my father was born upstairs in a farmhouse near a bay called Keweenaw, which is an Ojibway word meaning portage, the carrying of a boat or its cargo between two

My mother could not swim. She was born 10 yards from the ocean, her grandfather’s home, Jasmine Cottage, being at the very end of Church Street in the fortress of Galle, in Ceylon.  If she stood on the second floor balcony and threw a stone it could clear ten feet of road and land on

Suitcases, radios, and silent living rooms—these were my mother’s three complaints. Blessed with boundless physical energy and intellectual curiosity, my mother Anahid had little patience for drawn-out nags. Nor did she have a scheming mind. Her complaints were often the occasion for a passing dramatic pose, but while they were happening, the whole universe, it

In the summer of 1948 my dad rented a cottage on Cape Cod from an Italian man named François. Dad was a thirty year-old bachelor from a family of lapsed Jews. He’d fought in Okinawa, come home with blown eardrums, gone into business, and now he was enjoying summer weekends in the honeysuckle air of

After two days of gray skies, unseasonably cold temperatures, and on-and-off rain showers, the sun finally makes an appearance on this Monday of the long weekend. The warmth and light draw more of Nashua, New Hampshire’s residents than usual from our suburban homes to line the edges of Main Street. Children squeeze together along the

You could have what your father has, the doctor said. And I said, I don’t want to know. Well, wouldn’t you want to know, the doctor replied. And, again, I said, I don’t want to know. ___________ When I was a child, my father and I would go to church and dinner on Saturday evenings.

We are all contemporary writers in the sense of being alive, here, now, productive, and  unframed by criticism; and most of us are struggling for recognition by editors and agents, who stand as gatekeepers to publishers and living readers. We are not all contemporary, however, in the sense of taking this shared present as our

In 1833, the landscape painter Thomas Cole, recently returned to the United States from an invigorating trip to Europe, proposed to his patron, Lumen Reed, an ambitious series of paintings “wherein we see how nations have risen from the Savage state to that of Power & Glory & then fallen & become extinct.” How could

My brother told me I should write stories without an agenda. “You should write something everyone will enjoy – something like Holes or Secondhand Lions,” he said. Holes, by Louis Sachar, is about a prison camp for children. It’s a novel where, back in time, one of only two black characters in the book was

Seven a.m. and the hotel dining room was empty except for three of us at separate tables, dotting the fringes of the room. The black woman with red lipstick and long, rippling braids faced me, her back to the stout black man in a jacket and tie. I could see both of them, and they

“Black men die more catastrophically, across class, than anybody else in America.” Elizabeth Alexander   “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead negro’s grief.” Toni Morrison          One frigid January night in Boston, an eerie voice and slide guitar cut through the still air of our apartment. 

When he got back from the movies, my father’s face was uncharacteristically bright. Shaped by the sensibilities of his generation—Korea, John Wayne—he had always maintained a careful, emotional blankness, the impassivity taken, at the time, to signify masculine strength. Every morning in the fall he would drive us to grade school without speaking, thirty minutes

Early on, in the first shell-shocked weeks after you found out, you imagined the distant day when she would have sex change surgery. That’s how you thought of it then – sex change surgery, the day they would take the knife to your daughter and make her male. She was only fifteen then, and you

The coffee shop I frequent is less than a block away from my apartment. You can find me there most afternoons, sitting outside on the patio, smoking and drinking coffee, chatting about whatever comes to mind with whomever happens to be there that time around. I’ve found it’s a great place to sit and think,

I Am Conversation Breathe in, breathe out. My grandpa told me stories about his childhood. He told me how Japan occupied the Philippines during the Second World War. The Japanese soldiers trampled through the marketplace—looting the fisherman’s haul. As my grandpa told me this, his eyes, black pupils, looked away from me. His mind was

1981 to 1983— washington, dc  mail call: Lxxxx Pxxxx inmate number (37xxxxxx) federal detenion center po box 329002 brooklyn, ny 11232   the real howard university Imagine a clarion call from a familial glass horn difficult to resist: a sweet siren. Its tenor pull inescapable and you’ve been dragged under by its metallic wake over

Two years ago on the twenty-second of August, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in a Baptist Medical Center bed confined by two cold steel bars that were locked firm on each side. My single companion was an I.V. pole that dripped slow answers to an addictive future but kept me uncomfortably tethered to a 200

# Once upon a time I lived in Down East Maine. During the day I taught high school on Mount Desert Island, long a popular destination for tycoons like the Rockefellers and Fords, writers, painters, movie stars, and two and a half million other visitors a year. Dressed in a suit with matching tie and

I was a child, the height of a price tag that dangled from a coat, hiding among the dresses on the rack to stave off boredom. My mother and grandmother rubbed fabrics, inspected seams, scrutinized items from an arm’s length away. They’d pull a dress on me, off me, again and again — dull. But

Some years ago, I wrote an essay about Salem State, the university where I have taught for over a decade, suggesting that students get just as good an education, albeit a different one, than students at more prestigious universities. While they weren’t getting luxury facilities and high-achieving classmates, they were getting small classes and valuable

Pus is the herald of our body’s healing processes; where you find pus, you discover a struggle for repair and regeneration. Yellow and putrid, it accumulates deep within a former soldier’s limb to extrude the remnants of an old injury; forming a pocket of purulence around shrapnel left behind after an ancient skirmish, it struggles

Hugo Chavez is sitting on the side of the tub, watching my father as he takes a bath, his last one, as it turns out. My brother and I have limped him here to the tub with the built-in rails; rails it turns out he’ll never need because his time, from diagnosis to departure from

Reflections in an Election Year   Once upon a time, a very, very, very long time ago, a young woman went to college on the West Coast.  We’ll call her M.  It was the fall of 1969.  For the first few months of her freshman year, she continued to be a good, dutiful student who

To my Aunt Alicia The plaza below swarmed with people trying to find a place to watch the parade.  From the balconies I could clearly see the sinuous rumba line that moved like a multicolored serpent to the beat of the drums.  It was difficult to distinguish whether people were dancing or hugging.  One body

Notes from a Self-Investigation   Scene of the Crime: Kelly’s House Port Chester, New York 1979   They want me to take off my shirt. There are three of us: Me, Sally, Kelly. We are playing a game of truth or dare on the shag rug in Kelly’s basement, a spacious, brown-paneled room with a

JACKIE KENNEDY & AUDREY HEPBURN My family moved a lot.  I was the perpetual new girl: a skinny late-bloomer with buckteeth decked by metal braces. I found refuge in elaborate pretend games I played with my sister till I was well into my teens, and in old movies we watched with Mom.  I was fascinated

In January 1971, I was living in Columbia, Missouri, where for two years I’d been an undergraduate English major at the University.[i] A surprise to literate me, I’d become pencil-sucking bored with my classes, especially the non-electives “Restoration Drama” and “Chaucer.”

Not long ago on Christmas Eve day at Basseterre, St. Kitts, I found myself embarking on a deep-sea fishing trip, but I worried that the wind and the waves and rough waters might be too much, and that I would embarrass myself with seasickness.

From far points, Bob, Rachel and I fly into the same city—Los Angeles. We have no idea how long we will be in L.A., how much underwear to pack, the big or the small toothpaste, but we are there on a mission: to help our Abigail fight her anorexia.

The service at the crematorium was, by design, a godless affair. Daniel’s slender body was consumed in an eco-friendly cardboard coffin to the accompaniment of Heaven 17’s Temptation, one of the few hits that had ever ignited in him the courage to dance.

The passing cars move the air in waves that push against the side of the car I am driving, making a soft whup whup as each one goes by. The car is a Buick, wide bodied, low to the ground, solid in a middle-aged sort of way.

Walk until the day becomes interesting. That’s the approach to slow travel that Rolf Potts suggests in his book called Vagabonding. It’s also my preferred approach—although I didn’t dare use it my first day in Fes.

I love being someone who charges the net for a midcourt slam and surprises with an ace now and then. Which is why a fact that I never mentioned at twenty, forty, or even sixty, is now my shibboleth: “I’m a tennis player!” People look me over and say, “Wow! You still play!” and I feel powerful in the world.

The young girl crouches, listening to the men decide her fate. She is as still as a woodland creature, hidden among the goats in the barn that is attached to her whitewashed stone house on the outskirts of Sulmona, at the foot of the fearsome Apennines.

Every college freshman is warned against cribbing from the Internet, but I’ve done exactly that. I’ve gone to the cloud to get the standard definition of “nature writing.”

Once in Texas, I pulled up next to a Latino asleep in something like an Impala, outside the washeteria where I had come to do my laundry.

Since I began writing nonfiction more than two decades ago, I’ve ranged from book to long-form journalism, criticism, essay, memoir, and, of late, video essay.

On November 22, 2013, I woke with brains in mind. Funny, I haven’t heard much chatter about other November twenty-seconds, but this nice, round number—the half-century, the big five-OH!

When I hear the word costume, I think of a pink dress I bought the summer of 1993, when I was eleven, going on twelve.

Like many other African-American men, I found considerable joy in Barack Obama’s historic victory.

Halfway to Naitauba, the boat’s hull cracked. Naitauba was my last stop – a minor island on the eastern side

High up on the fire tower in the Pigeon River Elk Refuge, I knew something was wrong. We had been driving all day, in near silence.

I jumped on Mr. Curry’s back and held him. It wasn’t easy, possessed as he was by the animal fury of a man whose family was threatened.

“Are you pretty or are you ugly?” my father asked.
I looked up at his soft brown eyes, his pink lips pursed in a half-smile, and I guessed, hoping, “Pretty?” I was five.

Black or white. Open or shut. Up or down. Chocolate or vanilla. Shirts or skins.

A week or two into our son’s first summer at overnight camp, I got a call from my Uncle Karl.

On a perfect summer afternoon in the hills of Bath County, Virginia, I find myself walking down a shaded grass path that winds along past an ice-cold pond and dead-ends at a broad, cool river.

You could say it started when I was seven, looking through slats on the venetian blinds from my bed at sunset.

It’s my night to make something, not that it was assigned to me but it’s one of those things that’s part of the knowing portion of a marriage, all to do with the subtle, sometimes not so subtle,

When Dolly died this year, grief caught me by the throat.  “Mother and daughter,” people used to say when they passed us on the street; me pushing her wheelchair down an uneven sidewalk; her cursing skateboarders whizzing by. At the community college, she’d been a speaker in my classroom.  No one imagined we’d met behind

“Yo, Shakespeare,” said my friend Angela. “Write about unrequited love, false promises, fake IDs, blown head gaskets, radio late at night, sex with the same man after twenty-five years… you know.”

1. Unrequited Love

All of my loves have been unrequited, for I consistently fall in love with men who are less excited about loving me than I am about loving them. Of course, the accuracy of this claim depends on how one defines love—a word that, in my case, has perpetually adolescent overtones and that, when mixed with graying hair and housework, creates a kind of melancholy oldies-station uproar—those oldies that I can’t believe are old, those songs with the embarrassing end rhymes and predictable guitar sobs that I know I ought to despise but that keep making my eyes prickle and my throat swell shut.

It was Tuesday, my regular day to pick up my nine-year-old niece from school. This was a routine I’d started when Myesha was still in day care, a guarantee of spending at least one afternoon a week with her. Over the years, the basics of our afternoons had changed only slightly. There was food, talk, and an activity we could do together. When Myesha was younger, the activity was usually snuggling on the couch, where I would read to her until she drifted off into a nap. In more recent years, our activity time had led me to explore the woody trails of my neighborhood park and, after much practice, to learn the latest clapping games that girls invariably perform on playgrounds.

Last fall our town church had its annual fair, and as usual the library held its book sale on the same day. The weather stayed warm and dry, so we ate barbecue chicken and potato salad, seated at long tables next to the white wall of the church, which reflected the sunlight and made the air feel even brighter and warmer; shopped at the White Elephant sale, where I found a pair of giant felt slippers to slide over my boots when I bring in wood during the winter; and wandered down to the library to buy used books.

A train rumbles down the track and passes beneath my feet. I’ve parked my bike under a streetlamp and am bent over the bridge’s handrail to watch it head west.

Weeks after my seventy-three-year-old mother dies of lung cancer in her Mississippi cabin, cardinals build a nest in the lilac tree outside the bedroom window of our turn-of-the-century New Englander home.

Dear Brothers & Sisters of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq War vets is five times the numbers that die in the war, now about one an hour or 24 a day.

Seamus Heaney is a generous man by nature and by principle; perhaps sometimes too much so for his own good. He has written a humorous, yet wrenching poem about divided domestic and professional responsibilities, “An Afterwards.”

“Where are you from?”
“Lawrence, Massachusetts.”
“No, like, where’s your family from? Y’know, what are you?”

One Saturday a month, for twenty-five years, my mother and the upstairs neighbor, Frances, dyed each other’s hair. The two would chat and gossip over a growing mound of lipstick-tipped cigarettes and endless cups of coffee as they “partook of the fountain of youth,” their euphemism for this process.

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC.

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.
“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.
“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

I was in my early teens when I met, for the first time, a book that didn’t like me.

What I remember most about that hot and humid summer was the way fear took hold like a rip current.

They say home is what your heart keeps returning to. But for some it’s an accidental place, an extension of someone else, not yourself, something you arrive to by association. That’s how it was for me.

When you write about murder it’s best to start with a few facts. The first one is this:

I went to lunch with a man I was getting to know who suffered from depression but was disciplined and productive.

Billy Baker lived down the street from me, near the dead end. I was ten and he was eight, but he had a way about him that made him seem older.

I’m behind the wheel of my beat up Chevy Blazer, wearing a red and grey-striped softball jersey, with “Holden Electric” scripted in crimson across the chest…

People told me my mother was beautiful. By the time I was able to perceive her face, I only saw the mouth turned sharply down at the edges and a glimpse of wildness in her eyes…

The day I decided to again steal food I instituted three simple rules: Steal only essentials, only from big chains, never brag.

First, I remember his hand. Warm — like blood, like loss.

A person can starve to death in prison. By starving I don’t mean death through lack of food.

(Excerpt from Home Truths)   Dreams are a subset of lies, the way the unconscious mind works to make it possible for us to keep living with ourselves.

The beaming portrait of Kim Il Sung on the roof of the Pyongyang Airport was the first thing that greeted us when we emerged from our plane

At a writers’ conference not long ago, I gave a public reading from “Trading Off,” a memoir that for the most part dramatizes a turbulent relationship I’d had with an old high school baseball coach. During the q and a, I was asked the usual questions: “Did it really happen the way you wrote it?”

Culebra is an American Virgin island with a fierce sound for a past, a sound that still hollows it out and leaves it damaged…