In “Sower,” fire represents both finality and a kind of freedom. Its aftermath affords an opportunity to imagine a renewed world, with renewed requirements for survival.

Besides, if my actual past remains at my fingertips, how can I mold the memories of it into something more romantic than it actually was?

I grieve for many things; the engine of my grief changes, sometimes hourly. I grieve for our increasingly hostile and uninhabitable world, and I grieve for the cruelties that make it so, both structural ones and ones that individuals inflict on one another. But today I am grieving because I struggle to fathom all of the material loss of meaningful... See more

I do not desire any technology that might bring my late mother back to life, allow me to hear her voice or her laugh again. I believe that what makes the dead worthy of our grieving (by which I mean our memories, our returns, our affections) is that they cannot come back.

I understand this element of loss, the exercise of cataloguing all that cannot come back, at least not in its original form.

But I think I would like to revise this response. I was asked in one interview if I was worried about being forgotten. I don’t remember the answer I actually gave, but the answer I wish I’d given is that my greater fear is having my memory misappropriated—being gone and having what I’ve said or done be reanimated, reduced to some bite-size... See more

Instead, I will say that I was thinking about time—how it peels away from us in fractions that don’t always feel like fractions. The slowness of time’s passage, for me, has often depended on what story I can extract from the time spent. What can be told to someone else, which might then be told to someone else. If you are lucky, sometimes minutes... See more

Despair, too, because of how accessible escape is becoming in a world that requires more rigorous close looking, every day. And, of course, escapism is a supply-and-demand business. As the world requires more of the people in it, it also offers more opportunities to turn away.

Yes, a lost house itself is a tragedy, but there is an entire universe in the items inside, an entire universe in the single page of a book that drifts away while you’re running to catch a flight. There is an entire universe in a quote, an entire universe in interpretations of a book that begs for humanity to find a way to survive when our... See more