My mind seems like these two: Cowboy looking out the window in the morning and the Georgia O’Keeffe print hanging over my bed. Cowboy’s ears remind me of the Very Large Array, and I think he sees deep. O’Keeffe’s painting is far-seeing, too, its monoliths and movement called Road Past the View II.. Intent as …
Looking out the windows this windy morning, second cup of coffee on the stump beside me, thinking of friends and groceries and coronavirus. I remembered that March 18 was the date I stocked up for the COVID-19 quarantine, Cowboy food, too. I’ll need to make another trip soon. I was a thorough shopper on the …
At Cowboy and John’s, the new year resolutions are: 1. More lopin’, less mopin’. 2. More lit, less twit. 3. More César Millán, less carryin’ on.
This ship of state — this self-obsessed, rusting hulk of retired newspaperman — steadied the moment I felt the stillness of the coming autumn air. No pain this morning, only a sense of the gentle season ahead. I put out fresh water for scrub jays, finches, titmouses and Texas antelope squirrels, grateful that the rattlesnakes …
Morning rain in New Mexico and thugs going down on the East Coast can really mess with your writing. You know: You start feeling all cozy and don’t want to get out of bed, seduced by rare rain in the high desert. Your brain starts thinking with introductory clauses and you end up staring at …
from 2017 I was about to let loose with my latest personal essay when I encountered this buzzkill in The New Yorker: “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” I know I shouldn’t let my New Yorker reading pile up. I had heard rumblings of the essay crisis even before the May 2017 New Yorker piece by …
This really is about me and not my 19-month-old dog, but sometimes I think my self-knowledge might not be much deeper than his. I have been struggling lately with too much news and a lost appetite for fiction. You see, I grew up thinking I would be a fiction writer. But my newspaperman instincts …
Dad used to joke about what he was reading in the waiting room when we were born. Titles I remember are Nausea and As I Lay Dying. This did no justice to his first wife and mother of his three sons, but it is a funny reflection on an earnest, hard-working Depression-era guy who came […]
Donald Trump is ruining my fiction-writing career. As if it had ever really gotten started. I retired two years ago to exchange my journalism credentials for a license “to make it all up.” Then came Trump. Every time I got cranked up on a great American short story, or got another personal essay out of …
The trouble with blogging is that many mornings I wake up and realize I would be better off keeping my mouth shut. My 1-year-old Appaloosa-bobcat-coyote dog Cowboy doesn’t have much use for my deep thoughts anyway. But as long as I am on the subject, I will say for the record that, while friends told …
dream ranch 