1. Awakening My neighbor across the marsh keeps on hammering. There is a new president this morning, my daughter can’t stop crying, and still my neighbor hammers on. It is possible this is celebratory hammering.…
I am writing to you at the beginning of something. As one who has been through many beginnings, some more successful than others, I can confirm something you may be starting to suspect: there is nothing harder than beginning. The…
I have lived in North Carolina for thirteen years. I know because my daughter is thirteen now and was only three months old when we moved here. A handy mnemonic device. I teach at a public university in this recently…
I am sitting in my writing shack waiting for the storm. Hurricane Matthew has already crashed into Florida, flooded Savannah, and broken through the sea walls of Charleston—and Wilmington is its next stop.
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,
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