Rewriting a manuscript requires reading other writers and learning from them new ways of using the language—unthinkable ways, uncomfortable ways, unlikely ways. This is a quick list of what I took away from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22.
Category: Modern History
Our Borders: Ageless Youth and Deathless Life (An Epilogue)
Once upon a time, there lived a king and a queen, both young and beautiful, but heartbroken because they couldn’t have children. They had tried everything, they went to doctors and philosophers, astrologers and soothsayers—all for nothing. They had lost hope when, one day, they heard of an old medicine man from a village not far from the castle, so they went to see him….
Our Borders: The Fork in the Road (1980)
“Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts!” “To this day,” Radu Codrescu said in 2006, “I have a feeling of guilt every time I cross a border. Even when I go from the US to Canada—and I have Canadian citizenship—or come back here [to Redmond, Washington], I feel guilty of something. As if I were…
Our Borders: The Last Voyage (1993)
“Let’s go look for them right now,” Radu said. “No,” the officer said, “you stay here. We’ll look for them. We know how to look for people like you.” OOCL Challenge, the transatlantic ship Radu Codrescu, 30, was on board of in January 1993, was heading into a storm, and Radu’s friends, Paul and Claudiu,…
Our Borders: A Lucky Break (1993)
Even though they now knew how to get on a ship to Canada, Radu Codrescu, 30, and his two Romanian buddies, Paul and Claudiu, still had one huge risk to consider: that the captain of a transatlantic would throw them overboard if he discovered them. Hubert, the port security officer who had showed them how to elude the guards…
Our Borders: A Bright Christmas (1992)
Early Christmas morning in 1992, the port of Antwerp (Anvers), Belgium was bright with blinking lights of all colors, with flashlights and spotlights and searchlights. At 5 a.m., police, firefighters, paramedics, TV crews, and curious people were all waiting on the main dock for the door of one particular cargo shipping container to open. And when it did, three men…
Our Borders: Gone (1990–1992)
“After all the pain I went through to cross that border, I couldn’t believe that it was finally possible,” Radu Codrescu said in 2006. “For a long time I had this feeling of unreal. My biggest dream had finally come true, but it felt like a dream, not like real life. I had traveled before,…
Author Interview: Isla McKetta on Writing from History
Isla McKetta is a Seattle novelist, book reviewer and blogger at A Geography of Reading, and she also serves on the board of Richard Hugo House. Isla and I met during our Goddard MFA program six years ago and I have been reading her work ever since. I’m thrilled that she has two new books…
When My Blogging Became Spam
Last week, Facebook’s new algorithm determined that posting a link on my timeline to my latest blog post was spam, so it didn’t display the link in anybody’s News Feed, except for the few people who had marked me as their family or close friend. I felt as if I had done something illegal and…
Our Borders: The Two Ends of the Telescope (1989)
My protagonist and I crossed paths for the first time in 1989, though I only met him in 2001, when we were both half-a-planet away from our native Romania.