The Best American Essays 2013 (48 page)

In my imagination they both wake me, my mother nudging me quietly while shushing me so as not to wake my brother, my father standing behind her holding my coat. I rub my eyes awake and see their faces glowing in the half-light of the room, my dad waving us toward the bedroom door. Outside it is cold—this is February, north of Chicago—but it must have been clear. The three of us walk into a grassy clearing away from trees and train our eyes on the evening sky.

Dad lights a cigarette for my mother and then for himself, the glow from the match illuminating their faces against the night sky for a moment like two crescent moons. He shakes out the match and takes a long draw, letting the smoke out slowly. My mother fiddles with her cigarette before taking a quick puff, pulling her coat around her. We wait in the cold briefly, me standing between them, my mother pulling me toward her for warmth.

Suddenly it appears. “Over there,” my dad says, squinting from the smoke, and we turn to face east. The treeline forms a black horizon, and above it the Milky Way shimmers in the chilly air.

Dad kneels down, pointing up for me to see. The cigarette at the tips of his fingers traces the arc against the sky. My mother sees it too, and putting an arm on my shoulder, she leans forward to be sure that I have found it. I follow my dad’s arm to the spot among the stars and locate it at last, not the satellite itself, which is too small, but the casing, a tiny oblong of light, tumbling silently across the constellations nailed into the night sky. It flip-flops in a regular rhythm, like a heartbeat, without glittering, and, despite its size, glows with a white-bright incandescence. In her letters my mother calls this satellite “Muttnik”—a phrase in the press at the time—because of the dog inside, but it is hard to think of a dog now, or anything else, living in this slug of pure light.

I cannot imagine that night sky now without creating metaphors from the time three years later that I hid under the stairs and looked at the nails driven into the treads overhead, that coffin lid of stars that still haunts me as one of the few vivid memories of that time. Thinking of it now, the other memories come flooding back as well. Of me at the top of the stairs watching my mother crying at the kitchen table while my dad stands off to the side. Of me stepping out of my bedroom to see my mother sing “Fever” into the record console with a drink in her hand. No, those thoughts—those precious and horrible clues—don’t go away, but they also don’t erase that night, lost to memory but captured in a letter that I almost didn’t read, when my parents and I, somewhere in Illinois, stood in a darkened field together and looked into the heavens. I picture the tableau now like some illustration out of
The Book of Knowledge
, with me standing in my coat and flanked by my parents, my dad pointing and my mother with an arm around me, while the three of us gaze into the night sky with wonder.

“This is,” my mother wrote, “a fabulous age.”

M
ARCIA
A
LDRICH
is the author of the free memoir
Girl Rearing
, part of the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Series. She has been the editor of
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award for the state of Michigan.
Companion to an Untold Story
won the AWP Award in creative nonfiction. She is at work on
Haze
, a narrative of marriage and divorce during her college years.

P
OE
B
ALLANTINE
is getting taller and younger. He plans to one day be a professional skater. He lives on the Howling Plains of Nowhere with his wife, Cristina, and his son, Tom. His latest book is
Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere
(2013). As always he wishes to thank the editors of
the Sun
for making him presentable.

C
HARLES
B
AXTER
is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent collection,
Gryphon: New and Selected Stories
,
was published in 2011. His novel
First Light
,
from 1987, has just been reissued. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota.

J. D. D
ANIELS
has written for the
Paris Review, n + 1
,
Oxford American
,
Agni
, and other magazines. He is the 2013 recipient of
the Paris Review
’s Terry Southern Prize.

B
RIAN
D
OYLE
is the author of many books of essays, nonfiction (
The Grail
, about a year in an Oregon vineyard, and
The Wet Engine
, about the “muddles & musics of the heart”), “proems,” and fiction, notably the sprawling Oregon novel
Mink River
. His essay collections
Reading in Bed
, about books and writers, and
The Thorny Grace of It
(spiritual matters and conundrums) will be published in the fall of 2013, and his Big Whopping Sea Novel,
The Plover
, will be published in the spring of 2014. He is the editor of
Portland Magazine
at the University of Portland, in Oregon.

D
AGOBERTO
G
ILB
is the author of
Before the End, After the Beginning
(2011). His previous books include
The Flowers, Gritos, Woodcuts of Women, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
, and
The Magic of Blood
. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a range of magazines, including
The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, ZYZZYVA
, and
Texas Monthly
, and are reprinted widely. Gilb makes his home in Austin. He is the executive director of CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American literature and culture at the University of Houston, Victoria, where he is also writer in residence and the founding editor of the new literary magazine
Huizache
.

T
OD
G
OLDBERG
is the author of several books of fiction, including the novel
Living Dead Girl
, a finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize; the story collection
Other Resort Cities;
and the popular
Burn Notice
series. His essays, journalism, and criticism have appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
,
the
Wall Street Journal
, and
Las Vegas CityLife
, among many others, and have earned five Nevada Press Association awards for excellence. He holds an MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College and directs the low-residency MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts at the University of California, Riverside.

S
TEVEN
H
ARVEY
is the author of three books of personal essays:
A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation
, and
Bound for Shady Grove
. He has also edited an anthology of essays on middle age, written by men, called
In a Dark Wood
. He is a professor of English and creative writing at Young Harris College as well as a founding member of the nonfiction faculty in the Ashland University MFA program in creative writing. He lives in the north Georgia mountains.

W
ILLIAM
M
ELVIN
K
ELLEY
is the author of three novels—the award-winning
A Different Drummer
,
A Drop of Patience
, and
Dunfords Travels Everywheres
—and a short story collection,
Dancers on the Shore
. In 2008 he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College since 1989. He lives with his family in Harlem and has recently completed his fourth novel,
Dis/Integration
.

J
ON
K
ERSTETTER
completed three combat tours in Iraq as an army physician and flight surgeon. He earned an MD degree at the Mayo Medical School, an MS in business from the University of Utah, and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Ashland University. Dr. Kerstetter’s medical career included practice in emergency and military medicine, disaster relief, and education in emergency medicine in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Honduras. He was the in-country director of the Johns Hopkins training program in emergency medicine at the University of Phristina in Kosovo. He retired from medical practice and the military in 2009 and resides in Iowa City with his wife.

W
ALTER
K
IRN
is the national correspondent for
the New Republic
. He is the author of several novels, including
Thumbsucker
and
Up in the Air
, which were made into feature films. His most recent book is a memoir of his education,
Lost in the Meritocracy
. He lives in Montana and California.

M
ICHELLE
M
IRSKY
lives and writes in Austin, Texas, where she also works an earnest nine-to-five job, kind of like a superhero with a secret identity. Only not super. Or secret. She was the winner of the grand prize in the 2011
McSweeney’s
column contest. Her essays have appeared in
McSweeney’s
and in print.

A
NDER
M
ONSON
is the author of, most recently,
Letter to a Future Lover
(forthcoming in 2015), short essays on six-by-nine-inch cards written in and on libraries and things found in libraries and thereafter published back into the spaces where they originated, and eventually collected, unordered, into a box, which he supposes is a book, since it is after all bound and collected there.

A
NGELA
M
ORALES
’s most recent essays have appeared in the
Harvard Review
,
the
Baltimore Review, the Southern Review
, and
River Teeth
. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Currently she teaches English at Glendale Community College and is working on a collection of autobiographical essays.

A
LICE
M
UNRO
is the author of
Dear Life: Stories
. Her recent collections include
The View from Castle Rock
and
Too Much Happiness
. In 2009 she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize.

E
ILEEN
P
OLLACK
’s most recent novel,
Breaking and Entering
, was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a
New York Times
Editors’ Choice selection. She is also the author of
Paradise
,
New York
(a novel) and two collections of short fiction,
In the Mouth
and
The Rabbi in the Attic
, as well as a work of creative nonfiction called
Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull
and two innovative textbooks,
Creative Nonfiction
and
Creative Composition
. “Pigeons” is an excerpt from her memoir in progress,
Approaching Infinity
. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

K
EVIN
S
AMPSELL
is the author of the memoir
A Common Pornography
(2010) and the novel
This Is Between Us
(2013). His essays and fiction have appeared in
Nerve, Hobart, the Good Men Project
,
the Rumpus
, t
he Fairy Tale Review
,
NANO Fiction
, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and son.

R
ICHARD
S
CHMITT
is the author of
The Aerialist
, a novel (2001), and has published in the
Cimarron Review
, the
Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol
, and other places. His story “Leaving Venice, Florida,” won first prize in the
Mississippi Review
short story contest and was anthologized in
New Stories of the South: The Year’s Best 1999
. Schmitt has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2002.

D
AVID
S
EARCY
lives in Dallas, Texas. His first collection of essays,
Shame and Wonder
, will be published in 2014.

Z
ADIE
S
MITH
is the author of four novels,
White Teeth
(2000),
The Autograph Man
(2002),
On Beauty
(2005), which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and
NW
(2012). She is also the author of
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
(2009) and the editor of a story collection,
The Book of Other People
(2007). She has taught creative writing at New York University since 2010.

M
EGAN
S
TIELSTRA
is the literary director of 2nd Story, a personal narrative performance series dedicated to bringing people together through story. She has told stories for all sorts of theaters, festivals, and bars, including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week, Wordstock, Neo-Futurarium, and Chicago Public Radio. Her story collection,
Everyone Remain Calm
, was a
Chicago Tribune
Favorite of 2011, and her writing has appeared in the
Rumpus, Pank, Other Voices, f Magazine, Make Magazine
, the
Nervous Breakdown, Swink
, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and performance at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Chicago, and her debut essay collection is forthcoming in spring 2014.

J
OHN
J
EREMIAH
S
ULLIVAN
is a contributing writer for the
New York Times
Magazine
and the southern editor of the
Paris Review
. He writes for
GQ, Harper’s Magazine
, and
Oxford American
and is the author of
Blood Horses
and Pulphead
, a 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.