I have come to Ghost Ranch in the high desert of New Mexico for a week-long  workshop given by Laurie Doctor, a bookmaker, calligrapher, artist and writer. It is May, and a relief to be out of the Pacific Northwest, where the natural world is orgiastic with growth. Its forward motion… Read full post »

In the mailbox, there is a catalog featuring freakishly well-proportioned young women in merino, silk and cashmere. I decide to look through it as a way to unwind from work, and by the time I have scanned the last page I am ready to place my order for everything it has… Read full post »

It looks like an oil painting: sunset-pink radishes, chunky tomatoes, carrots peeking out like old coins. Woven throughout are brushstrokes of green – a meadow, perhaps, or forest floor.

I chew like an aspiring Buddhist, giving the experience my full attention. Something bitter, something spic… Read full post »

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
through the desert for a hundred miles, repenting.
You only have to let the small animal of your body love what it loves. {...}                            … Read full post »

When the nurse came to start my blood transfusion, she handed me a piece of paper to sign. It had a lot of words on it, and I told her I couldn’t read them without my glasses.

“Oh, it’s like everything else you sign in here,” she said… Read full post »

I’m spending my days in a reclining chair, that icon of masculine hibernation, recuperating from surgery. I eat and sleep here, kept company by fourteen perfectly framed Douglas Fir trees visible through the window.

I have dragged myself out of bed most mornings of my life, so it is iro… Read full post »

We can fix that, they say, and it will be good. But first, we must bring on the cavalry. They will have needles and knives and powerful drugs that will make you sick, but then you will get better. You imagine broken bones, lungs full of dust and spitting grit out… Read full post »

Maybe I was always indecisive, but I became self conscious about it when I was 18, trying to make a decision about a boy. I was always trying to make a decision about a boy.

I was working full time, running the printing press for the Vancouver Public Library. The details… Read full post »

Really, the site is a nightmare: The headline on the home page in a font large enough to be read by the legally blind, its wording as hysterical as its architecture. The lack of aesthetics - too much information, too little white space, enough distraction to keep me on the couch in my… Read full post »

I write because describing a raindrop or a cloud helps me feel less anxious about the storm. 

  Read full post »

The old woman's socks catch my eye as soon as she lowers herself into the chair. They are detergent-commercial white and covered with small, cheerful ladybugs. In a room whose decor can best be described as Upscale Institutional, such whimsy seems an act of rebellion. I smile with appreciation, but h… Read full post »

This morning I looked out the window and saw an ambulance, the sheriff and two emergency vehicles. I didn't see them take him away, but I soon learned Don was dead.

I moved here 12 years ago. Although the neighborhood was a little more bedraggled than I was used to, I liked… Read full post »

I've been scared for a decade that I'll die without writing a book. My book. Any day now, I could be hit by a bus or diagnosed with a terminal illness. I imagine myself on my deathbed in an agony of regret for my lack of discipline, for my stupid terror of… Read full post »

Mrs. Carpenter took hold of the sleeve of my blue acrylic sweater and marched me to the front of the room. Too terrified to make a sound, I mimed “I’m sorry” in the general direction of the waste paper bin beside her desk. This would not do. Mrs. Carpenter was a… Read full post »

I was 15 when the boy I desperately wanted to call my boyfriend asked me to hold his penis while he peed. I’d been waiting all summer for him to give me a sign that he liked me, and while none of my romantic daydreams had… Read full post »