Theme from S.W.A.T., by Rhythm Heritage. It is my first record, a 45 single bought at Montgomery Ward with allowance money I’d saved over the course of a month. I am eight years old. I am a huge fan of the television show S.W.A.T., which follows a special tactics police unit as they go about […]

In my novel, The Tumble Inn, Mark Finley looks back to when he and his feisty wife, Fran, unable to conceive a child and bored with their high school teaching jobs, followed Fran’s wild plan and left their friends and families in suburban New Jersey to begin new lives as innkeepers of a ramshackle hotel […]

FIRST YEAR OF TEACHING. NORMAL DAY. MY CLASSROOM. “OK,” I began. “Look at the sentences on the board. Can anyone see where we might be able to put a semi-colon? Where do we need more than just a comma? Stan, stop talking, please . . .” Lakita looked up from the desk she was tattooing […]

PROLOGUE If you are student of history, as I am, you study ghosts, the people that came before you, that grew up in the house you live in, planted the crab apple and apricot trees you eat from, plundered the mountain where you now walk your dog, and try to figure out what they created […]

When I was seventeen and dreamed big ballerina dreams, I also revered Aerosmith. I sat on the window ledge of Pacific Northwest Ballet memorizing Steven Tyler’s lyrics with my friend Jenna Butala. Crystals dangled from our necks. Names of boys like Santo vibrated against our lips, as we threw our buns back. Joe Perry jammed […]

Today, my dad is eighty-eight years old, but I do not remember his birthday. When I look at the folded skin of my eyelids in the bathroom mirror, it comes to me. It is the thirtieth of March. A dozen years ago, we celebrated my birthday together in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Under the veranda […]