Author Archives
Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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The terror of knowing what this world is about
Niraj Argaven grips my hand in the grocery store aisle and pronounces his name, moves to my side and hands the phone to his daughter, puts his arm around my back and faces the camera. I am now part of… Read More ›
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Waning crescent
Here it was, my whole life splayed out before me. Some days, just for an instant, I felt like I could do anything. The problem was, it felt so good I dwelled in that feeling and did nothing at all…. Read More ›
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Portrait of the artist as a portrait model
No one smiles in these old portraits. They look stiff, like they’re already dead. Maybe it’s the knowledge only portrait models have that makes them look like that, deciding how you’ll look forever. They look trapped in their own time…. Read More ›
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When the pines begin to cry
It had been a long time since I heard the owls cry in the night. Last night in bed I counted three in the distance, a hoot-hoot with a menacing tone. It reminded me of waking in Marrakech to the… Read More ›
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After blackberry picking
I remember the day Lily and I came home from our road trip. We’d left Utah on a Sunday morning and reached Seattle by lunchtime on Tuesday. Hadn’t driven more than six hours a day, surprised by how quickly it… Read More ›
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New school blues
In the dream I am in my underwear and we are in a crowded public square this time of year, this going back to school time we are all of us in our underwear in our dreams looking down, wondering… Read More ›
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Bookending
You could see where the landscape fabric was poking through the bark I put down in the beds and that rankled me. I hated seeing the irregularities, the underlying scheme. I could get really anal retentive like that. We noticed… Read More ›
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Sand tray therapy
It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or… Read More ›
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Work ID
I went back to work. In the last year I’d only worked nine weeks, two short contracts. Now I had a contract through the end of June, 2024 with the possibility to extend by another six months. The certainty felt… Read More ›
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Knowing what it’s like to be a snake
It was there on the trail I saw the snake and saw the world from that point of view To be a snake and never know what it was like to drive a car, read a book, or drink a… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 