Issue 18 / 2001
18 / Intimate Details
Bringing memory to life
The essays published in this issue represent survival and change, expressed through dramatic stories and intimacy of detail.
In “Second Chances,” Melissa Block, a breast cancer survivor, is off on her own quest to Vietnam with a crew of plastic surgeons, while Philip Gerard’s journey, “Adventures in Celestial Navigation,” captures the intimacy of sailing and seeing blindly at night. Aine Greaney travels with her father on a mission of connection and maturity through a sensory panorama of Ireland. In “Bridges,” Sarah Massey-Warren thrusts her readers into the stark and vivid reality of Elko, Nevada, while Russell Tomlin, in “Two Years,” leads us into Togo, West Africa, on a Peace Corps mission.
Already a subscriber?
Read this issue nowTable of Contents
FROM THE EDITOR: Beyond 9/11
I was returning to Pittsburgh through New York’s LaGuardia Airport—my first visit since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The security guard, a short, slender Latino in his late 20s, quickly rifled through my clothes and papers, but it was my shaving kit that attracted most of his attention.Notes on My Dying
I believe in death with dignity, don’t you? At least in the abstract.Grace. Nobility. Even beauty.As abstract as that.As abstract as other people.As abstract as characters in fiction.“All anyone wants is a good death,” I read.Dots on the Page
When I teach my copyediting class, I begin with the story of Dick Dick and Judy Dick. I tell this story because it is one way to explain the roots of my interest in the tiny details of language as they sit on the page.Killing Chickens
I tucked her wings tight against her heaving body, crouched over her, and covered her flailing head with my gloved hand. Holding her neck hard against the floor of the coop, I took a breath, set something deep and hard inside my heart, and twisted her head.Second Chances
Geoff, a plastic surgeon from Fort Wayne, is explaining to a Vietnamese surgeon and Mike, a fourth-year medical student from New Jersey, what he will do to the 5-year-old in front of him.White Girl in Harlem
Shortly after I arrived in New York City, living a few blocks from Harlem as a graduate student at Columbia University, I stopped wanting to leave my apartment. I started to think something was out there waiting for me.Silver Redhorse
Moulder Branch connected to Hurricane Creek, which fed into the Flint River much farther away than a person could hope to reach without a driver’s license. The Flint, in turn, made its loops away from the mountains through flat cotton and soybean country to pour into the Tennessee.Familiar Things
For six months the chancellor of the university lived next door. In May he and his family went to Disney World. Each morning Vicki fed his dogs, two Labradors named Mousse and Huckleberry.Two Years
Togo, West Africa, is a 335-mile-long, 70-mile-wide chip of country wedged between Ghana and Benin. Hugging the prime meridian at 8 degrees above the equator, Togo operates under Greenwich Mean Time.Bridges
“Prepare for misery,” my client had said of the spring weather before sending me to Elko, Nev., to research community life.Father
My father has fallen asleep by Athenry, the first stop out of the Galway station. His head is back against the seat, false teeth like a horse, his familiar smell of diesel and damp leather.Adventures in Celestial Navigation
You begin by pretending you know exactly where you are. You begin with a fiction.BETWEEN THE LINES: Report From a College Classroom: After the Terror
In his classic 1936 essay, “Shooting an Elephant,”—a frequently anthologized essay in freshman composition textbooks—George Orwell, an Imperial Indian policeman in service to His Majesty’s empire in 1920s Burma, is goaded by several thousand members of the Burmese populace into killing a testosterone-charged elephant that has been responsible for the death of a laborer.