In Brevity Magazine: On the hunt for memory

What a gorgeous issue of the always-gorgeous Brevity Magazine is Issue 44/Fall 2013. Essays by Jill Talbot, Cris Mazza, Scott Russell Morris, Lisa Knopp, and so many more. Book reviews. An examination of post-MFA Despair. All here.

I'm also blessed to be included, in this piece about memory—how we run behind and ahead of it, how we work to get near. The piece starts like this, below, and continues here:

Before I sat down to write this essay, I stepped outside and took a walk. Always a walk before I write.

I hadn’t counted on the winds, or the pewter-colored clouds massing overhead and crowding out the sun. The first drops of rain were a sweet release from heat. After that, it was an all-out storm—the rain falling white and thick. I stood beneath the fringe of two tall evergreens to wait the wild weather out.

Between my feet and the asphalt edge of the street a river began to run. Five inches high, six inches wide, carrying leaves, broken twigs, uprooted fists of grass, something silver and manmade. The sudden river took me back to my childhood and the creek that ran behind my neighbors’ houses. To dark shade and cool moist; bare feet in chocolate muck; to water striders and tadpoles, my mother calling my brother, sister and me home.

Thank you, Dinty W. Moore, whom I met long ago and still admire and feel lucky to be remembered by.