One of my earliest memories is of the bookcase in the second floor hallway of my grandparent’s house falling on top of me. I had been climbing it trying to reach a book on the top shelf when it toppled. I remember lying there, stunned, the weight of the books and their cold, sharp corners…

I want a bigger house. When we moved to our little cottage 18 months ago, it seemed perfect for a family of three. We didn’t think another baby was on the way, and anyway, an imagined baby and his paraphernalia took up a lot less space. Now that he’s a reality, our two bedrooms, one…

The following was delivered at the Image Seminar in Charleston, SC, on November 6, 2010. The theme of the event, which featured novelist Bret Lott, was “Risking the Heart: Telling True Stories in an Age of Irony.” Confessionals have always fascinated me: the photo-booth dimensions, the heavy red drapes or wooden doors; the imagined intimacy…

Now that the time change has taken place, the season of fall has finally settled in, and buckled down. The weeks are barreling past now, downhill, bearing their inevitable way toward Thanksgiving and the grey months of winter. Here in Washington, DC, the tourists are gone and the ducks have flown away. More than anything…

I’ve never liked the fall. Beautiful as it is, it’s too nostalgic for me, too fraught with endings, reminiscences, and bittersweet goodbyes. The only unequivocal joy about the season is football, and that’s not enough to make me change my mind. Because fall means winter is coming, and I can’t stand the cold. So spring…

No doubt it was one of the more truly mortifying episodes I have ever experienced. Right up there with the time my freshman year in college when, alone at a table in the quiet library, I thought I had successfully suppressed a particularly insistent bout of dorm-food gas; but so strained was the effort that…

Reading, as a means of entertainment, is gloriously and tragically solitary. Think about it. Watching a television show or a movie or a ball game is often done with others, preferably with snacks. Maybe your friends meet up each week to cheer their favorite contestant on Top Chef. Or you catch the new Indiana Jones…

Early in director John Curran’s film Stone, parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert DeNiro) sits behind his desk and listens to longtime prisoner Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton) plead for parole. The corn-rowed Stone, doing time for a crime that caused his grandparents’ death, dares to tell Jack, “I’m clean as you.” “Maybe, maybe not,” growls…

The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at…

We’re in the six-month slump. I remember it well from the first baby. The euphoria wanes, the hormones settle, and the delightful newborn grows into an impatient dictator, waking ten times a night to nurse, ready to move and play but unable to do so unassisted, unhappy unless making direct eye contact with another human.…