The night before we left, I was too excited to sleep. I said goodbye to my parents in the driveway then Margaret’s parents drove us up to Winnipeg for a cheap direct flight. The four of us shared a hotel room near the airport. I barely slept so boarded the…

The Journey Starts, Escape from suburbia I said goodbye to my parents in the driveway. The summer of 1974, I graduated from high school, turned eighteen and, with money earned at the mall, bought a round-trip ticket to what seemed like a shimmering fairytale across the Atlantic: Europe. I grew up in a comfortable, blue collar…

How feeling sick as a dog made me a brilliant writer This was my thirty-third day of hacking and coughing. Not to worry. The computer screen doubles as a sneeze guard. When one is laying prone sick on the couch unable to participate in the corporeal joys of life, too…

When even tried-and-true recipes result in disaster or deliciousness I consider myself an elevator cook. I have my ups and downs. A Thanksgiving dinner guest once declared my dressing the best he’d ever tasted. He wasn’t being polite. It was flipping amazing. Another dinner guest at another Thanksgiving dinner suggested…

Discovering strength in ambivalence — I walked barefoot along the water’s edge where the sand and the sea and the sky blurred to gray. Cracked crab shells and jelly fish littered the beach. I kept my focus on my feet but sensed a slick dark figure bobbing in the breakers; a body surfer in a…

Or why I am so good at pretending to be immortal I always thought that life would make sense one day. With time I was sure I’d come to see what it all meant, what I learned, and what words of wisdom I could impart to others to make easier…

A poem in phases In the dim-lit murk of memory where thoughts stick like boots in the marsh mud, I sink into an image of you, under a full moon, our first. *** Seated cross-legged on the almost floor of the night temple, almost because weeds pushing through the cracked…

Stop boohooing and keep writing — Maybe we heard a voice in our heads, like a literary Kevin Costner character: Write it and they will read. So we wrote our best thing. Poured our heart into it. Revealed our deepest and most vulnerable thoughts on the page and then sat back and waited for all the…

It’s billed as a love story, and not a war story. But all is (un)fair in love and war. I saw the play Vietgone by Qui Nguyen over the weekend at The Guthrie theater in Minneapolis. My hometown is Minneapolis but I left ten minutes after I turned legal (only…