Places
The Love of a Good Woman: A Visit to Alcatraz
“This is doing time. This is giving away a piece of your life. If I did get fixed, it wasn’t jail that did the fixing.”
Searching for the Internment Camp Where My Father Was Held
The phrase used was “barbed wire fever”—what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Lessons from My Mother, the Grave Gardener
I witnessed my mother work twice as hard as the men under the hot sun. All she had were her hands.
Notes From a Young Professor: Writing and Teaching Through Charlottesville’s Culture Wars
The police are there, expecting us, academics in revolutionaries’ outfits.
Waiting to Go Home: On Being a Traveler in Trinidad
“Tourists accumulate photos and mementos; travelers collect memories and friends.”
In the Sahara, a Little-Known Nuclear Wasteland
“There’s nothing nuclear in what I do. It’s just rocks we dilute into powder.”
The Law of Historical Memory
A strange inheritance from a grandfather resisting Franco and fascism in 1930s Spain.
Monuments and Memory: Working at Arlington National Cemetery
“It was an alternate world, where the dead came everyday, and we treated it as normal.”
Writing Behind Walls
Teaching a creative writing workshop at a men’s prison in Iowa.
Borders of the Past: On Europe and the Berlin Wall
The idea of a peacefully united continent that acknowledges identity must prevail.