by Elizabeth | Nov 17, 2011 | Uncategorized
It’s cold in Austria. Negative two degrees Celsius to be exact. Why did I come here? I only stopped asking myself that today, two seconds ago. Because now I know. It has something to do with Gogol and the red light district in Amsterdam. Also, the fact that I...
by Elizabeth | Nov 8, 2011 | Uncategorized
As things are really picking up around here between my ears, and as in another month and a half to decade and a half you will all be able to read my monumental latest (which has garnered a five star rating from both my mom and my girlfriend), it’s only natural...
by Elizabeth | Jun 22, 2011 | Uncategorized
How did a semi anti-establishment, rule-thwarting, convention-trashing writer such as myself end up with an M.F.A. degree after six semesters in graduate school? It’s a puzzle, sometimes even to myself. I never believed whole-heartedly in the graduate of fine...
by Elizabeth | Jan 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
I am here in Paris without my passport. That’s right, the chronic loser of things has done it again, only this time with the single most important item on my person. How did this happen? Well, maybe it’s necessary to start from the beginning. Or, from the...
by Elizabeth | Nov 21, 2010 | Uncategorized
1. Keep it secret at first. Just don’t think about it. And you won’t, until it flicks and flaps in your stomach like panic. Like falling. Practice telling everything. Leak truth in emails. Cryptic hints like, “I’m having something biopsied.” Then, maybe, “a lump.” But...
by Elizabeth | Aug 8, 2010 | Uncategorized
Confidence isn’t the same as courage, although having the former helps to embody the latter. My friend, I’ll call him Sam, recently moved to San Francisco from Idaho, before which he lived in Chicago where we first met. We were friends for a while in Chicago before he...
by Elizabeth | Jun 14, 2010 | Uncategorized
Who knew Redwood trees – some of the oldest, largest, most imposing creatures in the world – could seem so fragile? I hiked in a Redwood forest last weekend with friends. What I noticed first was the unnatural blackness of charred trees and brush. “Has there been a...
by Elizabeth | Mar 29, 2010 | Uncategorized
I spent the weekend with my sister. Sometimes I think we’re like sisters in a fairy tale – one tall and awkward-limbed, one short and edged by desperation. It’s the first time in many years that we spent time together outside the warm knot of our family....
by Elizabeth | Jan 30, 2010 | Uncategorized
Sexuality is fluid. It’s a theory I’ve held for some time now and here, right outside these sliding glass doors, is a metaphor—my favorite. More than a simple (yet delicious) metaphor though, or as an extension of one, it’s nature reflecting nature. This place is...
by Elizabeth | Jan 23, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’m here in San Francisco, soon to be my new home after a short two-year sojourn in Phoenix. What’s funny is that I started my new job here on January 18th, exactly two years from the day that I moved from Chicago to Phoenix. It’s been raining almost nonstop since I...
by Elizabeth | Dec 17, 2009 | Uncategorized
I attended a lecture today that blew my mind. You will know about it. But first: I went out running the other night. It was the first time after dark in this hood. I got lost. I typically run down the 97 steps, up the steepish hill of the street nearby, down the crazy...
by Elizabeth | Nov 28, 2009 | Uncategorized
Having to go to the bathroom in remote jungle towns of Peru requires currency. What does it cost? One sole. Soles and centimos are the dollars and cents of Peru, but when I heard it initially, encountering a uniformed woman at the threshold of a bathroom asking for...
by Elizabeth | Nov 20, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’m in Brooklyn for the first day of my trans-continental adventure. The apartment where I am staying is in Crown Heights, which meant nothing to me until I was walking from the subway to discover it and realized that the street names and the scenery are all familiar....
by Elizabeth | Sep 1, 2009 | Uncategorized
Foreign languages have been thrust into my experience lately. And for as much as it intrigues me, the idea of learning whole new languages, there is an almost thrilling fear that all but stops me from struggling through a conversation in a language I barely know....
by Elizabeth | Aug 4, 2009 | Uncategorized
Sometimes I want to live in a low rent dive—the smallest enclosure with just enough space for a bed and a chair, both rickety and worn but bug free. Or worst, a ramshackle tree house like the one my neighbor’s dad built when I was a kid and I was instantly insanely...
by Elizabeth | Jul 1, 2009 | Uncategorized
I woke up yesterday morning with an invisible and heavy apparition straddling me. “This is just grief,” I said to my bedroom ceiling, which was giving me that piteous look. When the obese ghost finally unlocked its legs from my waist so I could get out of bed, it...
by Elizabeth | May 6, 2009 | Uncategorized
I am back here in Chicago and it is a changed landscape. Storefronts bear different logos, carry new merchandise. Those remaining the same display their sufferance and stand nobler for it, as though they’ve been permitted to abide in my absence and therefore...
by Elizabeth | Apr 5, 2009 | Uncategorized
First of all, I’ve been presented with an experience altogether new — one that engages certain energies in me and rejects others. Or maybe that has the potential to embrace it all, everything. That’s all I’m going to call it: The experience....
by Elizabeth | Mar 18, 2009 | Uncategorized
I am at the San Francisco airport waiting for my plane back to Phoenix. The week that precedes my sitting here is bulging at my metaphysical seems. My bags, too, are more full. I carry new things. I wanted all along to write down so many details, so many finite...
by Elizabeth | Mar 15, 2009 | Uncategorized
I am in northern California, staying in a house on the edge of the earth, literally. The view from our liberally windowed house is the rocky, moody coast of the Pacific Ocean. It seems turned around, on the wrong side. It feels like it should all be flipped...
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