Read part 1 here. I owned a car that I couldn’t drive. After the “Possession at Devil’s Bridge,” as we’d started calling it, Phil had parked the Mini alongside my cottage before roaring back to campus in her reliable yellow Renault. The f…
I had a car in Wales. I know what you’ll say. Really? A car? That’s amazing! Don’t be snide. You’ve had cars too, I realize that. But when I lived in Wales as a graduate student, in the early 1980s, a creature came into my life for wh…
It came in a box. A big box, with two or three others. Sam had finally cleaned house. It’s not every day you get a box of tennis racquets in the mail. I ripped it open and immediately shook hands with each one. “Now guys, shake hands with the r…
The story so far: the author visits a fortune-teller whose prediction that she will become a poet changes the course of her destiny. In the U.S. there are two groups concerned with the conduct of tarot readers. The Tarot Certification Board of …
The story so far: the author and a friend visit a local witch for an assignment and, unexpectedly, the witch informs Pamela that her destiny is to be a poet. Things went downhill pretty quickly after our visit to the witch. I wrote the story for ou…
Toward the end of February, 1980, a witch told me I was a poet. This happened in the town of Galilee, in Rhode Island. Like the other Galilee, it was on the coast, and also like that Galilee, it was as good a place as any for a creation myth. I ha…
The daydreaming thing was my brother’s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn’t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour …
Hiraeth. It’s pronounced “here-eyeth” (roll the “r”) and it’s a Welsh word. It has no exact cognate in English. The best we can do is “homesickness,” but that’s like the difference between hardwood and laminate. Homesickness is h…