Browse Topics

Breathing Space

What I Do Best

A self-imposed Cultural Revolution, a grandmother to people of all ages, a to-do list

Taking Risks

Catching the eye of Harper and Row, being the first one into Chico Creek every spring, being tethered to the clothesline

The Written Word

Writing words on paper is particularly arrogant. How presumptuous to believe that words on paper can capture meaning, freeze life, hold it for even a moment.

The Reader Behind The Writer

A great masterpiece might sit there beside some obscure and shoddy effort. Schools and universities told you what books were great and worthy and famous; a library sat there mutely and let you decide.

Sunbeams

Worse than war is fear of war.

Seneca

Two Worlds

A Letter From Deena Metzger

It’s as if you’re walking on your heart and it’s holding you the way the earth holds you up — if you let it — or the spirit holds you up, your heart and your spirit, one holding you by one arm and the other supporting the other arm.

Sunbeams

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Herman Melville

Literal-Mindedness And Its Cure

For about fifteen minutes every day I worry about AIDS or herpes or Pentagon cost overruns. It’s not that they have any great effect on me, it’s just that I am a broad-based, categorical worrier.

Lost And Found

Finding then losing then finding again a pocketknife, losing yourself in a bookstore, losing your sex drive