Literacy Narrative

As the new reviews editor, I guess it’s my job to introduce myself. Perhaps some of you want to know what on Earth Entropy’s up to, choosing this still-green writer…

Image Credit: Joseph Cornell, Object (Roses des Vents); 1942-53; Construction, 2 5/8 x 21 1/4 x 10 3/8 in; The Museum of Modern Art, New York   Philosophy’s first question is…

When I was ten years old I tried to teach myself to speak and write Cantonese, using an old Chinese schoolbook I had found in the closet. At that age,…

Dear _______, I started reading forever ago. I’m not interested in the why, my longing for words almost aquatic—tangled in me like swamp root. Instead, I’m trying to write a…

The messages stream in, from friends, acquaintances, strangers. “Thought of you when I heard the news.” I am grateful for their thoughtfulness and ashamed at the attention. The well wishes…

Snow Days. They’re legendary. Mythical. Great, white unicorns or whales we chase in our sleep, wake up wishing we had caught or had caught us in the eye of their…

Our tour guide pulls over on the side of the road, a few hundred feet from a gas station. We wait inside the battered white van as a hard rain…

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London rises from the ground 750 feet from the original site of the theater, the one built by the Chamberlain’s Men. Its white timbered exterior glows…

My father’s diphthong extends his “bye” into multiple syllables. After the initiating “b”—punted forth from his lips—the sound slopes downward, ground-ward, and bounces, before ascending again in an upward arc,…

When people ask how I started teaching, I tell the story in a single sentence. I say that a regular from my day job recommended me as his replacement and…

Photo Credit: Don Rich   Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled. —Ellen Willis   1.   For many years I refused to read about Bob Dylan.…

In the summer before my third year of graduate school I drive 767 miles from Wilmington, North Carolina to Northampton, Massachusetts to visit my friend J—. I leave at 4:45…

Like other bookish types, I ended up an English major in college. Many of my fellow English majors wanted to teach, but that didn’t appeal to me at all; the…

Place names often sound to me like incantations. If the whole world can be conjured by shapes drawn and labeled on a map, then this world is surely the result…