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

  • No Christmas in Germany

    By on • ( 24 )

    At the end of 2009 we returned from a four-month sabbatical in Germany, France, Ireland and Italy. I was eligible for another sabbatical seven years later, which would make me 46 the summer of 2017, and seemed too far away…. Read More ›

  • An honest living

    By on • ( 10 )

    We unroll a map of Scotland that hangs off the edges it’s so big, can’t fit on the table. Some coarse navigating between destinations, time tables, circling forests and lochs, places they make Scotch. Late October, Scotland. October leaning into… Read More ›

  • Half a summertime ago

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    I’ve taken to a big steer named Cowboy who lives over the hill from my mother-in-law’s at the Second Hand Ranch, where they take in animals who would otherwise be turned into coats or eaten. But flies gather around his… Read More ›

  • Richard Brautigan is dead at 49

    By on • ( 6 )

    It took about a month for them to find his body and a whole lot longer than that for him to be discovered while he was alive. And he is there at the roadside jotting down notes by a flattened… Read More ›

  • Pick me out a poem

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    After I ate the poet I left the shells piled high on a plate translucent-pink, done just right — and after all that picking out the meat, it looked like more than when I started, once it was done.

  • The coin of the realm

    By on • ( 9 )

    It twists and shifts with the pace of a Rube Goldberg machine, drops men from boats to dangle in the sky, forest green figurines crouching, aiming, leaping — heroes in the minds of boys, heroes in living form some call sacrifice. A plastic American… Read More ›

  • Say goodbye to the Hoh

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    The sea spills its guts out to anyone who will listen, just hurls itself up and forgets it’s told the same story before: two black heads in the water floating that could be humans staring at us but they are seals,… Read More ›

  • What gets caught in the drain traps

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    It was really time we cleaned the drain out in the bathtub with it slowing down every day, the hope it would just sort itself out and we wouldn’t have to deal with it, the not-altogether-clean water pooling down there,… Read More ›

  • Sure

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    My grandfather has fallen asleep with a paperback in his lap, hands braided, glasses on — and I watch his reflection from the bathroom mirror where someone has left a stick of deodorant by the sink that says Sure, and I am… Read More ›

  • Postcard from Division Street, 92

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    We had all just graduated college — at least I had, Dave had a couple more credits to go but said screw it, he’d get it another time — and Chris was pretty much self-educated on heady books and foreign… Read More ›