When I opened my Instagram account I named it to go with a book of essays I was starting to write. Several years later, as I’m finishing that collection, the name has come to mean more than I could have guessed at the time. My life has changed enormously; in real ways I am not the same person. I remain a writer. I am still committed to life over death.
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Mammoth
Salespath
And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
Hesiod, Works and Days
A sale is a transference of feeling and energy.
Car sales training manual (paraphrase of Zig Ziglar)
The Great Unknowing
Published in The Threepenny Review, September 2020
“…woman is her body as man is his,
but her body is something other than her.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
That spring I walked into the hospital for a minor procedure and walked out with a handful of balloons into the strangest six weeks of my life. At forty-four I thought I knew the contours of the possible.