What Food Means
My mother would throw hunks of roast beef in the new-fangled pressure cooker and let the cap rock back and forth until the meat was pale and stringy. She would fry liver to leather, and produce slabs of round steak that required zealous chewing. We had frozen peas, frozen mixed...
Read More
Constantly Losing Everything
There’s been so little snow this winter. At last it’s coming down now, but in previous years we would’ve had the plows out every day for the last month or two. Here is a photo of me on the beach just two days ago. I was missing the snow and thinking about loss, about what...
Read More
I’m Thinking about Meditaton and Art
As a long-time Buddhist practitioner, I’ve particularly liked teaching Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I get to ask, “Is it true? Is ‘beauty truth, truth beauty’? Is that really ‘all we know and all we need to know’? If they have all their cylinders firing,...
Read More"Fleda Brown's voice is edgy, direct, yet surprisingly tender."
—Rebecca McClanahan