May 1994
The language is so much bigger than I am, so much older, more beautiful. How can I hope to tame it, cram it into a style?
Sunbeams
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Anatomy Lesson
I didn’t hear the word vulva until I was thirty. Instead I grew up hearing about it, my private parts, my down there. My mother and grandmother used Italian slang to refer to it: pesciuscia.
Poet
I had come to Yellow Springs for the Antioch Writers Workshop, an annual event on the Antioch College campus. My college writing teacher and advisor, the poet Jud Jerome, was an integral part of the workshop.
Disaster Envy
Hanging up the phone, I am overwhelmed with an embarrassing emotion: I am feeling left out. After all, I spent thirty-three years of my life in the San Fernando Valley waiting for The Big One. I should be in the muck of it.
Innocence
When we’d been married for a while, I expected my husband to say “I love you,” which he’d never said except on the inside of my wedding ring. Instead he told me he thought I really liked women and encouraged me to listen to my instinctive self.
Conversations With Women
Women seem to trust each other best by giving over the contents of their lives to another woman, who will allow those contents just to sit there undisturbed. Women look at each other and say, Yes, I have known this too.
Notes To Each Other
We were not brought together through signs and wonders; we did not even particularly love each other. We married on impulse the night of our third date without “hearing a Voice,” and things went rapidly downhill from there.
Cabin Pressure
Ted stares blankly at the seat before him, wondering how his travel agent could have construed his standard request for more leg room as a request for this miserable seat. His legs are cramped, his neck tense.
It Starts With M
My grandmother regularly receives letters from my dead father. I’m on my way to see her now with one of them. Uncle Kirby wrote it. He writes them all.
