April 2014

What happened to them now was up to Zoey. The wind and rain didn’t care. Not about the tent, not about them, not about her screwed up family. Not about the boats or the fishing nets, and certainly not about pilots like Patrick in their bargain-basement airplanes who thought they could fly around this wild

Matanuska River Viewpoint In a New Yorker article, Structure, Beyond the Picnic-table Crisis, John McPhee wrote about his struggles over decades to break away from writing about events in the order that they occurred. McPhee explained: “Developing a structure is seldom . . . simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme,

Elise Patkotak One of the questions I face most often as a regular newspaper columnist is why. Why would anyone put themselves and their personal opinions out for everyone to read and criticize on a regular basis, especially considering how poor the pay. There is no easy answer to that question short of admitting to

Sun jackknifes into                                the river. Elsewhere, wars blight and innocents die. The river’s texture of fish-skin, sparks, and                    burbles can breed a harvest  of grief. The month my                                        mother died, I plied her with chocolate determined to                        keep her alive. Near the end, I touched a damp