Sublime

Over a decade ago, I sat silently in an MFA workshop while mostly white writers discussed my race. I had decided not to name the race of any character, Asian American or otherwise—but the workshop demanded that the story inform “the reader” if my characters were like me, people of color.

Contemplating their loss, I could relate to Henry David Thoreau, who, a hundred and seventy years earlier, living not far from where I live now, wrote about mourning the loss of a tree just like mine: A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist . . . Why does not th

I sat in the back and watched my kids watch their movies, lulled by their capacity to be enchanted. I understood part of teaching is being a vampire. You draw on your students’ energies, and you learn just as much as you teach.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.