I was seventeen years old and I had been driving for exactly eleven months when my front left tire blew out on Highway 12 at nine-thirty on a Friday night. The blow-out was so sudden and violent that I screamed before I’d processed what was happening — one second the car was moving normally and … Read more
I have run the Thursday Evening Reading Circle at the Harmon County Public Library for twenty-one years. In that time we have read one hundred and twelve books, lost seven members to death, gained twenty-three new members, had one romantic relationship develop between attendees that resulted in a marriage. I was honored to attend, and … Read more
I have been an emergency medicine physician for nineteen years. I’ve worked in level one trauma centers in two cities, I did a year of humanitarian medicine in West Africa, and I’ve spent the last eight years in a regional hospital that serves a three-county area with a population that includes farming communities, a mid-size … Read more
I am not, by nature, a fearful person. I grew up in a family of nurses — my mother was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my grandmother worked emergency triage for twenty-two years — and the professional inheritance of that is a fairly high threshold for panic and a tendency to assess situations … Read more
I took the job at the Black Notch Tavern because my thesis adviser told me I needed to stop living inside my own head, which is a thing academics say that usually means go outside but which in this case came with a specific address on Route 9 and a phone number and the explanation … Read more
Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner — the country music star who had been her mentor and her professional partner and who she was leaving to pursue a solo career that she understood she could not pursue while remaining inside the creative and professional structure … Read more
There are objects that become more than objects because of what they contained at a specific moment in time. A hotel room tape recorder. A small machine of the kind that musicians of that era carried the way writers carry notebooks — as a capture device for the things that arrive in the middle of … Read more
The little girl asked if I could be her daddy until she dies. Those were her exact words. Seven years old, sitting in a hospital bed with tubes in her nose, and she looked up at me—a complete stranger, a scary-looking biker—and asked if I’d pretend to be her father for however long she had … Read more
There are musicians who perform and there are musicians who transform. The distinction is not about talent exactly — it is about what happens to the space when the music starts. Whether the room remains a room or becomes something else. Whether the people in it are entertained or whether they are taken somewhere that … Read more
Bob Dylan has spent sixty years in a state of conflict with his audience’s expectations. Not accidentally — not as the byproduct of restlessness or inconsistency. Deliberately. With the specific intention of someone who has decided that the audience’s comfort with a version of him is a problem to be solved rather than a condition … Read more