The rumor spread across campus like the brush fires that sparked during dry fall afternoons at the mouth of Bloody Run: someone had got a girl up the lane pregnant. The Headmaster knew. They were going to get expelled. At first we thought it was Sam. He had a ground floor single and he took […]
If once the boy within us ceases to speak to the man who enfolds him, the shape of life is broken and there is, literally, no more to be said. – Sean O’Faolain This is how it starts: fingers poised, your imagination pressing at your joints. Then you hit the keys, click, clack, click, clack. The […]
When I was 11 I cashed in my savings bond and bought a goat. I already had about 30 hens and a few roosters that we kept in an old shed at the corner of our property. I sold fresh eggs in the neighborhood and loved to hear the roosters crowing in the morning. But being […]
The filmmaker Erroll Morris asked the question on Twitter, “I am interested in assembling a collection of stories of people destroyed by reading (Any suggestions?)” and I wanted to make a smart contribution but couldn’t shake a faint memory of someone wrapped in a blanket wandering Easton’s Beach with a tattered copy of Far From […]
The thrum-clang of the guitar, the thump thump thump pulsing of the tom-tom, and the song starts, Holsapple up on the stage, shaggy-haired and energetic, Stamey a little behind, diffident and cerebral, bursting together into the rhythm, and I lean back against the curved wall to feel the plaster vibrate. It’s loud, it’s angry and […]
I posted a short piece the other day that shared something of what it was like to grow up deaf. The piece was impressionistic and intentionally obscure, with the hope that the reader would find in its spare uncertainty and vivid imagery something of the experience of having a sense impaired. The piece had […]
When you grow up deaf there are so many things you don’t know. The sound of rain on the roof. The roar of waves as they crest, their agony as they crash. The huffing sound of someone running behind you. The scraping sound your nails make as you scratch your neck. The brisk snapping of gum. The clanking ring of […]
The table was made out of an old wire spool. We cut the top off, pulled the slats out and made a triangular base from heavy maple. I don’t know how many yards of wire the spool held, but it must have been a lot, because we could fit the eight of us around the […]
My bedroom was no different from any other room, in any other house, in any other place, but I could not have been more aware of how different my place was. My bed rested below a long, tall window that peeked out into the pine grove between our house and the road. To the right, […]
The photographic record is a distinctly modern artifact. Before the portable camera, visual record emanated from the imagination, translated by an artist’s hand. The photograph captured visual images in a deceptively accurate rendering, with detail that could be placed like a scrim over our eyes and keep images unmarred. Smart observers point to the inaccuracies […]