I start lucky. Two friends in Southeast Alaska have a permit and a boat and invite me to join them as a deckhand, gillnetting. For three summers, we share a bunk and work within a few feet of each other, coming back to Juneau most weekends...
My first act of writing, after having a baby in early January of this year, was a February journal entry. I do not keep journals—my essays and poems mark time for me. But sometimes we are hurled toward what we normally don’t do.
On June 17, 1951, natives of the Ukrainian village Liskuvate began parting ways with everything they’d ever known. Earlier that year, the Soviet Union put a plan in motion to acquire Polish land that held valuable coal deposits.
As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...