Butterfly

Without gooey, wet music, nonfiction can get dry and flaky. Its author may also become too fact-heavy, which feels sort of like having eaten too much white rice. Tonight I read a survival strategy of a favorite writer: listen to opera when you write nonfiction. Makes sense. They’re cranking out the same goddamn “La Boheme,” […]

The Best Table

Last week has been hard to handle– full of yeses. Yes, we’d like to print this, and yes, we’d like to print that, too. I feel like someone just sent me to the best table in the restaurant, and I need to remind them I am the OTHER Schurman party, the one who has no […]

Things Other People Said: Long Ago or Far Away

“‘Don’t go, Peter,’ [Wendy] entreated, ‘I know lots of stories.’ Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.” — Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie They have everything in Neverland: hideouts, pirates, mermaids, caves, treehouses, wild animals, natives. Everything except stories. Neverland is only in the […]

Even Ground

Like most sensitive and interesting people, before I was twenty-two, I had got me to a therapist. I was not getting out of bed, and sticky with unhappiness about the end of my growing-up love affair, and I was ready to have someone talk some sense to me. She said, “If you don’t want to […]