I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her...
I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was...
The scene was picturesque: In the summer of 2021, the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself on the edge of a verdant cliff, where the forest hugged the sea. Here, in the Calanques, the clouds gliding across the sky appeared...
At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. I watched its seashell leaves wilt and drain. First they were jade, then chartreuse, then cream and sienna, like a stained...
I want my students to fall madly in love with Rosalind. She’s my favorite of all Shakespeare’s heroines, I tell them, pressing my hand to my heart, pretending to swoon.
