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It goes like this, see: I work all day and then wish that in the morning I was going to class and could talk about my work with someone. Or I get stuck on a sentence and when I walk outside, as [...]

I wake up in the middle of the night completely calm, yet alert, and grab the pen and paper next to my bed. I can feel the ease of closing the chapter with MGL, whose letter I buried in my mind [...]

I work on my first twenty pages of creative work for my MFA advisor all day. When I need a break, I ride fourteen miles on the stationary recumbent bicycle at my parents’ house, because I can [...]

Joe is chest-deep in a deep irrigation ditch he and the apprentices have been hacking at all summer. His curly, white hair bobs in and out of the hole like a forest gnome peeking around the [...]

Perhaps I have been remiss in describing the coffeehouse. It resides on the bottom floor of an old Appalachian building on the top of a ridge in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We’re [...]

I face off with the mountains for my Fourth of July and decide once and for all that this must be a journey of Independence. I will forgive myself for my wantings, laugh at them when I can [...]

The day unfolds like tissue paper around a wedding gift, somehow perfect despite the crinkles. I call Kim, my meditation instructor, and explain the crisis of my weekend. She laughs gently at my [...]

When I drive back into the mouth of the South Toe River Valley my eyes have to swell just to take it all in. Over-exposed to air conditioning and the elegant simplicity of the shrine room all [...]

(Written Saturday night) I begin to wonder if I know who I am at all without someone to bounce off of. Relative to nothing, what remains of who I am that can be named or seen; stable? The weekend [...]

I find myself in Big City, NC for a weekend meditation retreat. Out of both convenience and curiosity, I decipher a way to stay at Keller’s house to cut down on the commute. Nevermind that [...]