Vela Writers On: Money
I remember years ago – five years ago, to be precise – after I’d decided not to take another teaching job, I announced to my…
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In the Form of Birds
The summer my father died I bought a book on Southwestern birds. It was he who had given me my first feeder on my 8th birthday…
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Vela Writers On: Doubt
We know it so well: that familiar feeling slinking up to assail us as we fight our way through a piece, as we send…
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Additions and Subtractions
I’ve tried a lot of different subtractions over the years: selling my plasma, going without health insurance, living in a house in the woods with no indoor plumbing…
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Learning to Float
It was gray, raining, but a narrow ribbon of cornflower blue ran between the stormy patches to the north. The ribbon ran over the long rolling hills…
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Goodbye to All This
So, I’m balking on my grad school apps. It’s not because they seem arduous—in fact, they seem surprisingly streamlined.
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On Change
A few months ago I started swimming in the morning. I used to think I hated swimming in the morning. I thought: I’m not a morning person.
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A Digital Notebook on Invisible Borders
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of…
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On Being Unalone
For twenty-five days I live in a northern house. I have the place to myself. I am out in a nowhere. The house is thirty kilometers from the nearest town…
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The Journey in the Song
“All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience,” Leonard Cohen once said, speaking about the process of songwriting. But as a listener…
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A Hidden Writing Life
For the first time in my life, I have a room of my own in which to write. I also have the precious commodities of solitude and time.
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A Life’s Work
By the time my father was in his late fifties, he’d calculated the number of days of work he had left until he could retire; it was somewhere over eight hundred.
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