All posts filed under: Creative Writing

Two zebra finches snuggling on a twig

Short Story: The Fledgling

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A child had died in the neighborhood. A four-year-old girl called Molly. The day it happened, there had been snow. Molly and her mother, Sarah, went out to shovel the front steps. They took the dog, an eager, young chocolate Labrador. The snow was heavy and wet, the kind that packs well. Molly had just learned to make snowballs. Afterwards, the neighbors would point to the steep slope of the yard, the tiered garden beds, the rows of shrubbery wrapped in misshapen bundles of burlap and twine. There was no space to play, and the child was always running around in the boulevard. Molly had hurled a snowball into the street and followed as the dog went after it. Neither of them noticed the car, but Sarah, hearing the crunch of tires in snow, looked up from the shovel and said, “Molly, stop! Car!” The little girl halted, teetering at the curb, still laughing at the Labrador as it scrambled to find the snowball in the white slush of the road. The car rolled forward …

William and his goose.

On Living with Geese

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The goose arrived in early Autumn. William, my husband, was standing on top of the shed, working on the roof. The shed was ramshackle, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with bottles and bags of powders—alumina, bentonite, borax, cobalt oxide and lithium carbonate—wood working tools, packing peanuts, and weathered cardboard boxes. It belonged to his mother, Daphne. Nearly eighty and a working potter, she used the shed to mix her glazes and pack her pottery off to folks around the country. William’s father, Roger, had built it in the seventies, and the asphalt shingles were so curled and cupped that the roofing nails had all been exposed and were bleeding rust. As William pulled the nails out, steel strained against the wood, creating a series of rapid screeches—something like a manic squeaky toy or the call of a domestic goose. Read more [Appeared in Switchback literary magazine]

On Raising Chickens

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One spring, a friend purchased a $2 carton of fertilized eggs at the farmers’ market and stuck them under a borrowed incubator. Twenty-one days later, the resulting clutch threatened to overwhelm her modest backyard coop, and so she farmed the chicks out to adoptive parents. I presented two of those pullets, Hazel and Lydia, to my husband for our second anniversary. At the time, it felt terribly romantic. On one of our early dates, William had used the butcher paper covering a cafe table to draw me an elaborate plan for the kitchen garden he hoped to one day build. In addition to vegetables and fruit trees, it included an ingenious chicken hutch. Since then, we’d relocated to San Antonio, Texas, and it seemed like we’d be missing out on part of the experience if we didn’t keep some kind of livestock in the yard. Chickens would be charming pets. They would bring us fresh eggs. When I brought Hazel and Lydia home, they were six weeks old, still small and fluffy. Their feathers were …

Book: Minnesota Lunch

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What’s for lunch? On the Iron range, one answer with the weight of history is a pasty— ground meat and vegetables folded into a pastry crust. Make your way along Eat Street in Minneapolis and encounter the Somali sambusa, the Mexican torta, or the Vietnamese bánh mì. Stop by a Scandinavian hot spot to find the traditional open-faced sandwich, assembled with fresh fish and vegetables and herbs. Beyond providing our daily bread, sandwiches carry stories and cultural traditions. In researching these tasty, tasty sandwiches, my colleagues and I fanned out across the state to sample sandwiches and chat with chefs, church ladies, fisherfolk, turkey farmers, and bartenders. The result is a book that serves up an unconventional regional history loaded with culinary anecdotes, treasured recollections and tasty recipes. I contributed three essays to the book. >> Get it