There is nothing like a chainsaw to make a man feel like a man. I caught myself in a dramatic pose sinking that steel into the side of a fallen tree, slinging it like a weapon, wondering how ominous and… Read More ›
Creative Nonfiction
Change my life
It’s the strongest wind storm of the year and I do something I’ve never done before: drag a chair outside and sit by the front door with a blanket and coffee watching it come in. The sound is like the… Read More ›
Don’t fall on me
If there’s any month in Seattle I really struggle with the rain it’s November. It’s not a mist or a drizzle but full-on sheets of rain, sideways rain, cold, blowing rain. Rain that gets through old roofs and runs down… Read More ›
Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue
Life had a way of folding in on itself, unraveling in bizarre and beautiful patterns. You could watch and feel like you were a part of the fold or outside of it, not living but still alive. The pattern was… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Bill Pearse 