Just after the first Gulf War, I moved to Jeddah with my husband.

The story goes that as a child my mother finished a book every day.

Ten p.m. in Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood of circuitous alleyways ten minutes or so west of central Tokyo by train.

Years ago, when I was a Disney Screenwriting Fellow (a program that evolved out of the need for Disney never again to be dead last in employing women and writers of color, probably more out of corporate embarrassment than enlightened self interest), I had the thankless task, they didn’t even own the rights, of adapting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

If I am to explain how, because of my father, I became the person I am, I must begin with the story of my father, with the man who had a determining influence on my youth.

These long white days / Have gone by with no recording.

Inebriating. We’re inebriating. Seasons are / clay windows, we climb through them / all radiant.

Dear Darkness—consider this / my last attempt / to reach you.

They visit you in the darkest hour / all of your lost loves.

Renunciation / is an evolved form / of desire

I packed up the books

It’s five o’clock, we’re walking in the sun / Down an over-wide, under-ridden road

The pieces that broke off the Song Dynasty / horse as it was crated from Hong / Kong to Norfolk

The plaster / will come down in blue dust / with these hoses turned upon it / and the sun in its house

Two birds came upon a crust of bread lying on the path through the woods.

With output of twenty-seven hundred envelopes an hour where prior but three thousand were made a day, cry when you consider the empty envelopes piled on each of our desks

The two women appeared in Conrad’s office late one afternoon in March.

"Do not worry if you have built castles in the air . . . that is where they should be . . . now put the foundations under them . . ." —Henry David Thoreau

That first evening in my new city, I had a phone call from my father, wanting to know how I was getting on.

It’s easier driving through the country, especially when you doing a cattle haul.

There is a tiny Southerner inside me.

Last July, I was stranded for a week at Camp Ali Al Salem, a U.S. military base in Kuwait.

In one of the texts in The Notebook of Things that Are Difficult to Explain, the blind poet speaks of a certain event that took place in an institution known as the Last Citadel.

We begin with the first function.

“All his life Peter was afraid of flying,” Sally Goodrich said.