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 f... See more

A photo that was supposedly potent enough to tell an entire story turned out not to be real, yet people were so eager for a narrative that they would seek one out anywhere, even from a source that was empty, a source that they knew was empty. What did that say both about the story and about the people? A place was actually on fire. Evidence of the ... See more

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 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 interact... See more

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.

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 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

It may help, too, to be honest about what is already here. “Sower” is about a future on fire, but the author’s present was on fire, too. We can’t always be looking toward the future. The climate disaster isn’t coming. It has been upon us for years—at this point, most of the years that I’ve been alive. The crises are here, and they are speeding alon... See more