Out of Place

The house is like a novel. For many years I called it “my father’s house,” but that was wrong. It is my mother’s house, and it has always been. It is my mother’s novel. It is my mother’s house,…

That morning, fog had chopped off the tops of the mountains, and then the afternoon rain, spiced with hail, hammered the roof of our house. But near dusk, sun slanted down through the openings between the foothills, and I decided…

Wallace Stegner believed that writing from and about the American West was ignored, and as he became known throughout his home region, he chafed against being considered regional—when considered at all—by the East. I remember watching a television interview with…

There is always something missing. Is there always something missing? Yesterday I was lying in a hammock in a beautiful courtyard. It is summer now, but it was a coolish day, and a row of birches stood off to my left,

Five years ago this spring, the Georgia Review ran a special feature called Culture and the Environment. The corner­stone of that feature was Scott Russell Sanders’s essay, “Simplicity and Sanity,” which described how Henry David Thoreau’s words might help us…

We live in a time when essays are often bullied into being articles, when the marketplace and the Internet, both ever-hungry for action, serve to cattle-prod the lounging essayist out of his or her natural ambling pace and into something…

I In the evenings, when I read and take notes in my journal, I am showered by applause. As you can imagine, it’s a warm and rewarding feeling. I work outside, or as close to outside as you can get…

I live in a development where all the streets are named after birds. To get home I pull in at Ivocet, pass Whinbrel and Kestral, and take a right on my road, Petral Court. There’s only one problem. Skim through…