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Learning From Goats
When I was a kid, my mother was so busy and so often harried I thought she didn’t love me.Issue 10
The Five Glorious Mysteries
The light stays late in the Montana Valley. It is midsummer. We are at the farm playing Dare Base. My five brothers and sisters and the Tartarkas make nine cunning competitors for this fast-paced sweaty game.Issue 10
FROM THE EDITOR: Style and Substance
Last fall, James Wolcott roasted me (as the "godfather behind creative nonfiction") and this journal on the pages of Vanity Fair (October 1997). In a 4-page article "Me, Myself and I," Wolcott lambastes most creative nonfiction writers, including Phillip Lopate, Tobias Wolff and John McPhee.Issue 10
Memories Like Splintered Glass
I am in a small black carriage, moving fast. The roof is in place. The gray sidewalk is running away beneath the wheels, as it always runs when you bend over to see it.Issue 10
History of My Hair
Hair. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, it was about all you had. All the consumerism and conspicuous consumption— Ronald Reagan and his always perfect conservative hair—were decades in the future.YouIssue 10
Snakebit
As I dial my mother’s phone number, I skim the first page of my story. On the computer monitor, I mouth the sentences, liking the way they roll one into the next, confident and certain. When I was 6 years old a rattlesnake bit me. Ask my mother and she’ll say this didn’t happen.Issue 10
Love, War and Deer Hunting
I remember my first real deer hunt, the year I turned 16 and was allowed by state law and local custom to finally carry a rifle and kill a deer, as somehow entirely adolescent, unlike any deer hunt I’d been on before.Issue 10
Action de Grace
Every time I went to Haiti I felt I was going to die there. It wasn’t because I wanted to or intended to court the risk.Issue 10
Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?
I don’t remember what my second grade teacher wore! How can I recall the dialogue when my Dad left 10 years ago? All my summers in Maine blur together. That’s what my students will say tomorrow when I return their first efforts at turning memories into memoir.Issue 10
The Better Porch
We sit on the newly built front porch of one of the houses on my street—a street of squat, sided homes for people a step up from trailer living—behind the motorcycle dealership, the pawn shop and half a block from the Mission Mart.Issue 10