“Hold it still,” my father told me. We were in the barn, setting steel traps for the raccoons and groundhogs that came to feed on our corn and beans. “Easy now,” he said. “We’re almost home.”The trap rested on a piece of planking so he could step down on the prongs of the spring-tension handle and spread the trap’s jaws.

In my early 20’s, fired by the experiences of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and my mother, I embraced financial austerity, taking a path that would produce unforeseen difficulties years later when I would try to get a credit card.

The themes of the 11 essays collected in this issue, What Men Write, What Men Think, are curious to consider. Men, it seems, write about their fathers, their heritage, their professions and their cars, not about their mothers, their wives or their children.

It was normal and usual for a foreigner, a blan, to go through a period of anxiety and fear while planning a trip to Haiti. Perhaps it was even sensible. For Haitians of the diaspora, the risk of visiting their country was much greater, but I had taken to observing certain Haitian practices before I bought my ticket: consulting all available oracles and examining the bird entrails with great care.In

It’s raining outside, a soaking March rain, and my countryman stands there in the garden getting wet. This is fine with him after these days of blue sky and winter dryness, I suppose, since he is rooted in this country as I am not, he being a blackgum, the tree known to science as Nyssa sylvatica.

Last winter I was followed by crows.

It is just after 5, the busiest time of day for the store, and my cousin Graham and I are up at the front ringing up customers. I’m running the register, and Graham is bagging groceries.

Boyd White’s car has been stolen. My friend and a fellow writer, Boyd drives an ‘85 Monte Carlo that he works on when he has the time and the money.

When I was about 10 or 12, there were four places in my town of Norwood, Massachusetts, that stuck, and still stick, in my mind as defining compass points of home and who I was.

You sell yourself, not what you’re selling: to all the salesmen who ever worked for him, including, for one dreadful, interminable summer, me, my father promulgated that bit of advice. “The products are pretty much the same,” he’d say.