THE PAST IS NEVER PAST, TO PARAPHRASE FAULKNER. There’s a powerful amount of truth in that observation, but it’s also true he never anthologized his nonfiction. What was, no longer is. This is the dual and dueling truth. When I look back at these collected essays, I’m struck by their earnestness, the in-the-moment quality that suggests a writer who—how could this be?—had no idea that such a thing as the future might exist.
I don’t know how many books I’ve written. They are not each “like my children.” Good God. They’re just books.
I still like to write. But what I really crave is the physical world, in this bright moment of life. Moving rocks, gathering firewood, hiking, swimming in cold lakes. Puttering, beneath an immense sky.
The author of these essays was a writer, on his way to becoming someone who would one day be asked to look back. It’s an interesting enough view, but I don’t feel the need to stare too long upon it. For there are still days, and miles, ahead, until there aren’t.
I’m so grateful to be welcomed into the Counterpoint family. Not an angle of repose, but a dynamic, living ecosystem of literature, ideas, passion, craft. Thank you to Jack Shoemaker, Dan Smetanka, Tajja Isen, Laura Berry, Nicole Caputo, Farjana Yasmin, Rachel Fershleiser, Wah-Ming Chang, Yukiko Tominaga, Megan Fishmann, Vanessa Genao, Katherine Kiger, and Barbra Rodriguez. I’m grateful to my family and friends who have somehow always accepted and even understood the solitude a writer craves, needs, and fears, and have helped make a space for it: my parents, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles; my daughters, Mary Katherine and Lowry, their mother, Elizabeth; and my sweethearts Carter, Sissel and Siri. What heaven is this, to be embedded into such a matrix of love, intellect, and passion?
Thank you also to the University of New Mexico Press, publishers of my previous book of essays, Fortunate Son, which contains two of the essays reprinted here. And to the countless editors, publishers, editorial assistants, copy editors, fact-checkers, and proofreaders of journals, magazines, and books that have handled these essays over the years, turning them over and over in their hands, polishing, smoothing, stretching, trimming, sanding, clarifying. Thank you.