I’m hard, congealed anxiety, poised on the edge of a chair. My hands are shaking, feeling so barely assembled, I half-expect my fingers and thumbs to start dropping off. I’m so nervous I can’t remember which foot to put on the stool; so, after an eternity of indecision, I…

At one of the guest lectures I attended, painter Nathan Oliveira described an evening when he’d presented a slide show of his work to a number of artist friends. “Why, you’ve got a whole exhibition’s worth here!” they’d enthused. “But they’re all the same painting!”...

That fall was the beginning of a second Renaissance in my life. In the first place, Ella moved to Berkeley; instead of rare long-distance telephone conversations that I could ill-afford, at long last I had my best friend close at hand. In the second, I’d always wished...

Back in California before the semester started at Tiburon College, I missed being out in the wild hills around Cadaques so much that I started driving mornings to the wilderness parkland that extends for thirty-two miles along the East Bay hills from Richmond to...

And I had, after that giddy day at the Flat Rocks with Terry, really considered the possibility of following him back to England and trying to create a life there, just as I had considered going with Rick to Chicago. My high school friend Nikki had met a Canadian in...

     She woke up after only a few hours, feeling refreshed and peaceful for the first moments before she remembered…and that put the ache back in her chest. Wanting to comfort herself, she lay back and smoothed her hair over the pillow, then held a mirror over her...