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UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS

BUTTERFLY MAN: THE GOTHIC IN FOWLES' THE COLLECTOR

“WRITING IS CLEARLY a form of madness,” John Fowles wrote to me in the summer of 1996. It was a parenthetical aside in a letter about his recent visit to America...

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MEDITATIONS ON A SHADOW

INTO THE DARK

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I AM ON THE ROAD, dying. Wrapped in sheets and a thermal blanket, I am lying on my back, my knees up and arms at my sides. A woman holds my hand, my left hand. I don’t know her...

THE ROAD TO TRINITY

UNDER A NEW MEXICAN morning sky of pale blues and radiant pinks, in the lavender shadows of the Sacramento Mountains, we converged at the northern edge of Alamogordo. We came from all over the world, an incongruous group, hardly a group at all but that we shared this common desire...

MY WILLA CATHER

NEAR THE BEGINNING of My Ántonia young Jim Burden, sent by his Virginia relatives to live with his grandparents just north of Red Cloud, Nebraska, walks outdoors on his first full day in his new home to survey his surroundings. The granaries and gullies, cornfields and sorghum patches, box-elders and willow bushes, and “the gentle swell of unbroken prairie”...

FABLING THE DARK:
THE NIGHTMARE REALM OF NURSERY RHYMES​

OURS WAS A STORY-LOVING FAMILY, a covey of yarners and listeners. We were out of North Carolina, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, and lived in towns with names like Blue Hill, Oak Creek, Red Cloud. Like a hill, a creek, a cloud...

RETURN TO MY ANTONIA

HOW MANY OF US have been assigned a book to read for a high school English class by a well-intentioned teacher and come away from the experience thinking, with all the conviction of heady youth, "Thank God I'll never have to read that again"?​

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