Feminine Nihilistic Gospel Song
For the first six months of the pandemic, I embraced a monastic lifestyle. I walked daily through a five-acre nature preserve a few blocks from my house in Spokane,...
Nonfiction
Riding the Music Wave with Joe Holt
A few years back I had a weekly radio show called North Star Nugs, on which I played jam bands, jazz, and improvisational music. In preparing this playlist for River...
Landscape Anxiety
John Gardner says there are two plots: man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. In Ellensburg, I’m doing both. I took the job because I needed...
Riding the Music Wave with Brandon Hobson
Because serious art is where complex and difficult questions are made human and uncomfortable in a time when most people don't like to feel uncomfortable, I can only say that...
Kin
J. Gee (1913-1975) In my family, there was a woman who knew how to fly. She had been pushed by a man, or perhaps the man’s wife, or perhaps the...
Common Sense
Before I left NYC to live in western South Dakota I did not know how much I did not know—that prairie grass undulates and shines like ocean waves in the...
Fractals
0. Every year on my birthday, my mom tells my birth story. In the middle of labor, she left her body and floated up to the ceiling then looked down...
Riding the Music Wave with Kevin Sampsell
I always wanted to be a DJ when I was a kid, growing up in Kennewick, Washington. When it was time for me to either go in the Army or...
A Letter to My Four-Year-Old Son, on Moving from Southeast Alaska to New England
The ocean was off to one side, the rainforest off to the other, but all you could see was straight ahead, and down, to the patch of earth where your...
Riding the Music Wave with Chelsea Hicks
Music is really important to me, but finding music that I like can be difficult. It’s not about genre. It’s about a sense of uniqueness or distinctiveness in the song...
From Sugarcane to Diabetes
At thirty-two an urgent care doctor called and told me that my fasting blood sugar of 397 mg/dL was dangerously high. Fasting blood sugar for me should have been 85-120...
From Whale Lore
In the harbor, moon jellies pushed their smocks through the tide as the steady barking of sea lions tickled the gulls into frenzied screams. On the Bay today at the...
My Unreliable Source is a Bird
My mother walked. Every day. Five miles. Sometimes ten. Rain never stopped her. Nor 110-degree temps. There’s Martha, people said, from as far away as three hundred feet. Her gait...