Writers try not to repeat themselves, except when they mean to. Poetic forms such as the pantoum and villanelle use deliberate repetition to powerful effect. Sometimes, however, unintended repetitions emerge in the course of a story, essay or series, revealing unsuspected themes or buried urgencies. In that way, writing becomes discovery, like an archaeologist digging…

Writers try not to repeat themselves, except when they mean to. Poetic forms such as the pantoum and villanelle use deliberate repetition to powerful effect. Sometimes, however, unintended repetitions emerge in the course of a story, essay or series, revealing unsuspected themes or buried urgencies. In that way, writing becomes discovery, like an archaeologist digging…

When a man asks a question about something important, he is doing something important. Let the man ask the question. Help him, if possible, to answer it. Whatever you do, don’t parry, obfuscate, or otherwise stifle the question. I make these observations in light of Levi Asher’s comments on the blog, Literary Kicks (which, incidentally,…

Last week, on what felt like the last day of summer, I walked into my soon-to-be-demolished backyard. It’s a beautiful place, and the realization of its imminent demise provoked an unexpected surge of emotion. My wife Anne and I pay very low rent on a wonderful 1920s house in Shoreline, Washington, and every morning we…

My husband Ben just started his third year of medical school: running the gauntlet of twenty-six-hour shifts, cranky surgeons, and “pimping” on the rounds—the crude term for masochistic bedside Q&A sessions. Meanwhile, back at home, the brutal schedule has required yet another consideration of how we share domestic duties. I wasn’t alive when Peggy Lee…

It’s a horrible thing to be stranded within your native tongue when no one around you shares it. The mind rages at its helplessness. In such situations, rhetorical matters are irrelevant: the niceties of tropes and figures, the arrangement of thoughts, the cadence of delivery—all useless. We can even feel as though we move among…

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. —Mark Twain in a letter to George Bainton, 1888 In the 1980s, NPR’s Morning Edition regularly included a short segment, “On Words,” featuring poet and translator, John Ciardi. In his…

“You are the universal fugitive / Escapist as we say.” —From The Masque of Mercy, by Robert Frost Some years ago, I attended a wedding reception at an elegant B&B. We danced to the light of fairy bulbs strung high in the trees. The gentle currents of a lake lapped against the lawn’s long incline.…

Jerusalem, I say quietly. Jerusalem. The alter of evening starting to spread its black cloth In the eastern apse of things The soul that desires to return home Desires its own destruction. We know, which never stopped anyone, The fear of it and the dread of it on every inch of earth, Though light’s still…

Every Thursday afternoon for several months in 1966, my mother dressed me in a white dress with a big bow and puffy short sleeves, a Peter Pan collar and blue smocking, and drove me into the Haight-Ashbury. I wore socks that folded down and black patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother had pulled my hair straight…