Author of BECAUSE WE WANTED TO! • ABOUT EARLINE • STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD
Follow up to the book review published in bookscover2cover
Recently, listening to a talk by poet David Whyte, I heard him speak of “the parts of ourselves we have yet to meet.” I thought of those mystery rooms, and something clicked, finally. The rooms are parts of myself I have yet to meet, to know, parts of a bigger me to be discovered and explored.
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Nonfiction essay published in The Wrath-Bearing Tree
June 1991. I’m half-way up a seventy-foot rock facing at Camp Hale, Colorado, my body pressed against the hard, cool granite. My fingers search for purchase on what feels like a polished surface. I’m ascending one of the rock towers the Tenth Mountain Division, a unit of 15,000 men, scaled when preparing for mountain and winter warfare during World War II. CIA secret operatives trained here, too, including Tibetan freedom fighters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Inside me, my own war rages. I took the lead instructor, David’s, suggestion that I climb blindfolded, because I trust him. But under normal circumstances, even trusting an experienced instructor, I wouldn’t climb this giant slab for love or money.
Please check out The Wrath-Bearing Tree for essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry on military, economic, and social violence: https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com
Creative nonfiction published in The Write Launch
Standing in Tiananmen Square that autumn day in 1998, I marveled at its vastness. The few people populating its more than fifty-three acres seemed like ants on an enormous sidewalk. The square could hold many, many more. Multitudes. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine multitudes there, specifically the million protesters packed into those 4,736,121 square feet at the height of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
Conjuring the protests, images of the movement’s final hours flooded my mind— tanks, heavily armed soldiers, protestors desperate and defiant, their fervor steadfast despite the overwhelming threat of being shot or crushed, their inevitable fear. Read more…
Please check out the whole issue for compelling short stories, long short stories, poetry, novel excerpts, and other creative nonfiction: https://thewritelaunch.com