“You must be asking yourself why I’m not in the enclosure with the wolves like the other conservationists,” the gentleman, an elder in age, said into the microphone. “It’s quite simple. I might not make it out.” You wouldn’t think West Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue University and many, many cornfields, would be a place…
Category: Autobiographical
The Writing Tick Psychoanalysis
I have a tick in my writing that has followed me for years. Maybe writing about it will be like when people who fear snakes do that process where they slowly acclimatize themselves to snake nearness and, baring no tragedy, lose the fear. When I write for my students, I hear murmurs. Someone will eventually…
Learning to Rock Climb
Wherein the Author Describes the Beginning “Let me down,” I said. “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “But you are almost there.” “Let me down,” I said again, this time with the loud but hushed quality of a seriously perturbed person feigning composure. Nothing matters when you have climbed, with you hands and legs, like childhood days,…
Falling Back on Cereal
Before college, my life was littered with empty cereal bowls. This was largely the fault, and perhaps the triumph, of my mother. I ate cereal like one greedily gasps for air after running 1,000 miles per hour. Instead of lungs and air, it was cereal and stomach. Growing up, there was never any soda in…
What I Want to Say When Someone Asks Where I Am From
There was never one house or one place. I was born in a hospital in downtown Cincinnati and taken to my first home in the quaintness of Loveland. It is up to science to know if this place had any affect on me as I moved when I was two. I remember this next house…
On Tapping with Thumbs
Tapping on screens ain’t so fancy. It’s pretty darn video-gamish. Something I’d never thought would ever help me in life. I used to lament the waste of muscular strength. My parents, I’m sure, did too. Nothing is worse than sitting in a spine-curved-cross-legged hump on the ground with the reflective gaze of the TV and…