Author Archives

Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

• Factotum (for Peel)

  By Bill Pearse on February 15, 2017 • ( 27 )

  After college I moved to the beach and got a job delivering pizzas; my friend Peel moved to New York and dabbled in homelessness and then on to Portland, where he fell in with a group of shoplifters who returned… Read More ›

• Stick this in your LinkedIn profile

  By Bill Pearse on February 15, 2017 • ( 19 )

  When I met the other consultant the first thing I thought was god, he’s young and the next thing, god, I’m old…I’d been out of the workforce about a year, maybe two…but I felt much older than that, I felt… Read More ›

• Last Valentine’s Day, in Berlin

  By Bill Pearse on February 14, 2017 • ( 15 )

  Last year on Valentine’s Day we left Berlin by train in the late morning, and though we had great weather our time there, that Sunday it was gray and wet (like how you’d picture Berlin in mid-February), but it made… Read More ›

• Irregular verb patterns and dreams

  By Bill Pearse on February 13, 2017 • ( 13 )

  I went on the side of the house that still feels like the country and had a leak there, spied the full moon through the trees out too many nights in a row now, bleary eyed and runny; I saw… Read More ›

• A branch the size of an oar on a medieval slave ship

  By Bill Pearse on February 11, 2017 • ( 16 )

  

  I worked a couple hours in the yard cleaning up branches and breaking down limbs clipping, sweeping, yanking out roots and pruning, stuff we probably should have done in the fall—then just got in the car and drove out to… Read More ›

• ‘Where he’d really be’ (for Alfred Lambert)

  By Bill Pearse on February 10, 2017 • ( 6 )

  

  There’d been some sun for a few minutes in the morning but then it went back to gray and acted like it would storm. The days fanned out like messily cracked eggs fumbling for the edges of the pan, legless… Read More ›

• The Sponge Factory diaries (Philadelphia, ’95)

  By Bill Pearse on February 10, 2017 • ( 17 )

  Perhaps Philadelphia got its edge from the fact that the mayor ordered the bombing of a house in a residential area in 1985, a house with children and potential convicts inside — or perhaps it was like a jealous younger… Read More ›

• The circular references in stairwells and turnstiles

  By Bill Pearse on February 9, 2017 • ( 9 )

  

  In the bath I wrote a poem comparing fruit to genitalia and in our den tried to relax but the record player’s so fussy it requires adjustment, like a harmony of adjustments between the settings for arm tension and anti-skating,… Read More ›

• “Equilibrium”

  By Bill Pearse on February 8, 2017 • ( 15 )

  

  The sky and sea met at a line on the horizon, the end of themselves, as defined by their meeting. There they became indistinct, what made them so resigned, combined with the other. And they gave themselves freely, that line… Read More ›

• First listen of the White Album

  By Bill Pearse on February 7, 2017 • ( 8 )

  

  I realized Loren had my copy of The Corrections I’d given him in the early 2000’s: he said it was that book that made him realize what kind of writing he does and does not like, and that one was… Read More ›