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Estuary (writing while walking)
Knitted into the plot of the novel manuscript I’m working on (which I won’t summarize here) is an estuary restoration project. I’ve drawn on a couple of preserves I’ve visited in recent years to think about what the imagined place might look like, what it is trying to accomplish. Recently, I hiked through the South Slough […]
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Walking the West Highland Way
Having enjoyed and endured twenty-five years of each other’s company in marriage, we thought it was time for a treat and rewarded ourselves with a trip to Scotland and a walk on the West Highland Way with our kids. I wanted one of those luxurious hikes where you spend the night at a cozy inn […]
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Cardinal Reflections
It’s a firebird, or maybe a flower. I was out cutting flowers early this morning, six a.m. and muggy in a way it seldom is in Oregon, or maybe my hurry just made it seem warm. And then I was looking for pictures of cardinals, and found instead reflected light on wood. Of course, there […]
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Rebuilt wetlands: noise and surprises
The Delta Ponds are former gravel pits, strung between a freeway and a shopping mall, a band of apartments and retirement homes, a batch of car dealerships. It’s a made place, and also a natural one. Reclaimed, reconstructed. It’s an attempt to re-complicate just slightly the once braided, now restricted course of the Willamette River. […]
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Night Herons on the Dock
Around 7:00 p.m. last Saturday, full dark solstice evening, we were on the dock in Newport–nicely sated on roasted garlic and Dungeness crab soup, smoked salmon salad, and Prosecco–wanting to stretch our legs and look at the fishing boats before heading back to the inn. The water was full of tiny fish: two inches long, […]
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11 Odd Things Learned in the Course of Translation
–tidbits picked up in translating Beyond the Islands (Alicia Yánez Cossío) and Trafalgar (Angélica Gorodischer)– Some days, translation is like a treasure hunt, a sanctioned scavenge after curious words and unfamiliar allusions. (Happily, I’m a fan of dictionaries and reference books; my dictionary stand is a prized possession.) When the project’s finished, some of those definitions and […]