It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San …

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

"Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, / If you ain’t bad they just won’t let you in / Oh, Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, / The damnedest place you will ever live in"

The apex vent of a parachute, it turns out, fits right around a pecan trunk.

I have said this already, many times, over and over again, I have said, “I am doing a kind of writing that keeps ending in drawings,” and lowered my voice and scratched my head in a pantomime of …

St. Christopher strides across the river. Both hands grip a walking staff bracing him against the current, his calf muscles flexing as fish swirl about his legs. He is looking up at the infant Christ …

Rod Stewart and his entourage swaggered out onto the terrace restaurant of our little hotel in Italy wearing matching whites, coordinated, like a basketball team of alcoholics.

At 1am, 2am, the across-the-road-guy decides to start shooting stuff. Cans or nothing maybe. Ten shots each time. After each ten you think he's all out. After the first ten shots I wonder whether …

Two sides of what used to be one wooden box hang on the walls of the Smart Gallery in Chicago. At first glance they are unremarkable: vaguely Italian-looking landscapes populated by two vaguely …

You know where this is going: Danny lives across the street, house number 32-25 to my 32-26, and he is eight years to my seven;

I was a sharp-shooting cowboy trapped in the body of an eight-year-old girl, and I wanted a guy friend to hang out with. Ray, blond and tall for a second-grader, with a perpetual sunburn and a …

Some nights on Sardinia I find myself holding my breath. Long after the sun has set and the heat simmers over miles of sand and sleeping towns I lie awake and stop breathing.

At nineteen, I take a Greyhound from small-town Iowa to Chicago, Illinois, to see American Gothic in a museum. The painting features a farmer and his spinster daughter in front of a white peaked …

Because I am a girl, I say I was born in the Year of the Chicken. I reserve the cock for men.

The rosary, like the color wheel, is a meditation I have never prayed. The wheel, like the rosary, is composed of three mysteries. The two together are broken into five intercessions. My hands circle …

Once, at a bus stop in Kaliningrad around rush hour, I found myself in line behind a group of Russians ready to climb an already-full bus, to head hither or thither. A one-legged older man, in a long …

Ziggy Stardust and Southern Boogie dominated the FM airwaves the era I lived on greasy tacos from Jack-In-The-Box, ditched high school cap and gown for the beach, wrote poetry and drank vodka-laced …

“I just can’t get down with all the self-flagellation,” I tell my partner, Chris, who’s been Catholic his whole life—previously in religion, now in countenance. It’s the first Friday of …

Everything is in all things, I repeat as I thumb through my copy of The Art of Flight in search of the phrase. The five words enter my head like a mantra, a ritornello, a motto of ancient alchemists. …

"Is it hard?" I asked my childhood friend. I couldn't remember his name--the name of the baby she'd lost. I hadn't been close to her for years. Her arrival at the wilderness guard station where I …