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It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.

“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”

“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”

…

Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk's cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his les…

One of my art teachers in college sympathized with my inability to leave the studio until I made something good (with no criteria for what that would be). He said the problem was that I couldn’t get out of my own head enough to let things flow. He said I was too worried about what people would thin…

The belief that work will be there for me even if all else falls apart is also part of my inheritance. After every breakup or rejection I call my mom in tears in order to receive her reliable instruction to work through it. She tells me to write about my feelings and to channel my energy into other…

A magazine asks me to write a short piece in response to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, a series of texts Calvino wrote in the 1980s about the qualities he believes are unique to literature and which will carry us through the next millennium. My assignment is to write about his f…