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The Twelve-Hour Shift

I was home on fall break in my final year at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and I needed money to pay tuition, so I was working a twelve-hour shift with my father at the ceiling-tile factory.

Home From The War

I am waiting to turn left at an intersection. A driver cuts me off, we make eye contact, and I am caught in the endless loop of a memory I thought I had left behind eight years ago in Afghanistan. I begin to feel panicked.

The Nesting Ground

After fifteen years in prison I was beginning to assume my life couldn’t get any more lopsided and annoying, but now some cruel functionary has started a war against the local swallows.

The Salt Seas Of The Heart

A Tribute To Brian Doyle

You believed that everything is a form of prayer, including laughter, including tears. Yes, you were a reverential man, but you weren’t stiff or boring or preachy or dour. Your essays were both concise — often just a page in length — and lush, your sentences as intricate and twisty as plants in a terrarium. You combined prose and poem (and prayer, you said) to bear witness to the miracles around us.

Secrets Deep In Tiger Forests

Next door, in a run-down daiquiri-pink house with bedsheets instead of curtains on the windows, lived Whitey Carr, who loved to pound me every Sunday with his tiny fists. My mother said I had to feel sorry for Whitey because he’d lost his mom, and his brother, Raja, had come back crazy from the war.

On The Border

In 2015 more than a million refugees came to Europe seeking asylum. Most were fleeing the fighting in Syria and Iraq or escaping Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Bringing only what they could carry, many crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece before continuing on to wealthier countries such as Germany and Sweden.