Acknowledgments

For grants and fellowships over the years, I would like to thank Inprint, the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, the Department of English and the Edelstein-Keller Endowment in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

For reading earlier versions of these essays, I thank Mark Doty, Emily Fox Gordon, Kimiko Hahn, James Kastely, and Lynn Voskuil. Charles Baxter provided trenchant advice. Amanda Coplin, Laura Flynn, Braden Kerwin, and Rachel Moritz created generous community.

For their steadfast support, I thank my family, especially Earl and Margie Tevis, and Diantha Tevis. For sustenance emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and gastronomical, I thank Chad and Nancy Bissada Wilson; Michael and Mary Daniell Bryant; Julie Goolsby; and Valerie Jean Conner and Stan Makielski.

And thanks most especially to David Bernardy, strength and help, my dear one.

 

Some of these essays have appeared previously in the following magazines:

“Bigfoot’s Widow,” Barrelhouse

“Beyond the Wilderness,” North Dakota Quarterly

“Ave Maria Grotto,” Southern Humanities Review

“Barefoot in a Borrowed Corset” (as “Bather, Alone”), Conjunctions

“The Wet Collection,” Bellingham Review

“Chihuahua Desert Love Song,” AGNI

“I Keep a Jar of Clay Beside My Bed,” Shenandoah

“Crescent City Beach,” Isotope

“Second-String,” Dislocate

“Building a Funeral,” The Southeast Review