We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›
Poetry
How to love, with fences
There are limits to my love as with fences to remind us what’s ours and keep things out, keep things in — Love is a word we use for protection, like all things defined there’s a start, an end, and… Read More ›
The Highly Capable Program Nomination Ends Tomorrow
When I was in school, they called it Gifted. After Gifted came Honours, and after that, was everyone else. Heike’s son Sascha speaks perfect English, with a delicate English accent (he’s 11) and explains how it works here in Germany:… Read More ›
‘The best Defence Against the Dark Arts’
I asked Lily to write the word beautiful in her journal and then draw an X through it. I said be careful about using this word in your writing (she used it twice in the same paragraph), and we talked… Read More ›
The importance of turning back
In the first draft of my memoir, which I left behind in the States because it has a bad energy objects sometimes can, I began with a scene from 1993 that traces the start of my career to its source,… Read More ›
The logic of the bells
I turn like a rotisserie chicken every quarter hour in bed, with a window angled open toward the church up the street and the bells tolling every 15 minutes, and I wonder if they’re live bells or triggered by some… Read More ›
The churchbells on Sunday
I get behind two lesbians in the Italian market, this medieval town in Germany — the market, no bigger than an elevator car, a telephone booth, and I say to the guy behind the counter you can leave the cheese… Read More ›
The someday, faraway passages
The want to be, could be, should be is too hard to be and easier left for another day that’s faraway, unsaid. There is no day now, no deadlines or rules, no place to be but the blind insides of space, where… Read More ›
Full disclosure, on writing (The Hex)
I blew myself out of the page with nothing to make me feel real except the thought my eyes could be my hands and my breath could make me believable.
Who made the constellations
The days fanned out, an ocean of stars came into view And Crow was there too, a star in each eye gave him sight — the same glow on his wings gave him flight, and though it took a million or more… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 