Last Thursday evening I accompanied a group of ten students to Washington D.C. to hear Joan Didion talk about her new book, Blue Nights. The event took place in the Avalon Theatre, a charming old movie theatre with a tall glowing marquis. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I brought a copy with me…

I recently began a writing experiment, because most days it feels like my words are blood, and the world is filled with vampires. They want replies to emails, and responsive words to their words in meetings—sweet precious Christ, the endless meetings—and then there are the documents that must be meticulously edited each time any human…

How many times have you heard the admonition “Don’t be a hero” in any given circumstance involving danger? To the extent it’s meant as a caution against foolhardiness and the kind of bravado sought for bravado’s sake, it’s wise advice. There’s nothing praiseworthy in risking your life and others’ when the object is impossible or…

Martha Marcy May Marlene tied me in knots. It took me hours to untangle myself. The title of writer/director Sean Durkin’s first film is hard to say, and hard to remember, for a reason. This is a movie about a woman who can’t remember who she is or what version of herself is true. She…

Every year on 10 November friends from long ago wish me a happy birthday. The thing is: it isn’t my birthday. When I was eighteen I decided I was sick of everybody telling me what to do, so I decided to get free—so I joined the Marines. Ten November is the Marine Corps’ birthday. Every…

We bought our rickety old house almost seven years ago: an eternity of time, it seems to us now. It was winter then and we had just one child—a son, our first, a little butterbean with bright blue eyes whose bright flaxen hair stuck out like cotton from the top of his quilted coat. We…

In advance of turning forty this past summer, I decided that I wanted to greet the milestone by getting into shape in a way that I never had before. Having let my gym membership expire for financial and practical reasons, I decided that not only would I reinstate it, but also throw in a short-term…

In college, I encountered some lines from Gregory Wolfe about the vocation of the artist. As someone who had been carrying the desire to write, and the desire to make this writing my life work, the words were perfect. “Vocation,” Greg wrote, “is a mysterious thing. It seems to come to us both from without—as a call…

At my local yarn shop, we were sitting on the couches talking about what knitting means in our lives. As the conversation revved up, with everyone tossing out comments about how knitting can be at once meditative, creative, solitary, and communal, one knitter threw in, “It’s like we all have a yarn to share.” As…

When I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I took a yearlong Western Civ. class. We began with the ancient Greeks and ended somewhere after Freud. (I probably kept that syllabus, the way I keep everything, but where?) Of all that I read and wrote about that year, here’s one sentence that has stuck with…