Years ago, while studying for my US citizenship exam, I paused over the words “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Because I grew up in Europe during the time of popular uprisings against communist regimes, I was used to words such as freedom and justice and equality in revolutionary speech, so the pursuit of happiness…
Story Archive
The Other Side of Fear
I stand on the other side of fear And I’m alive. He isn’t.
Yes, but What Did They Sound Like?
When my friend Cristina speaks, I listen. Cristina is both a scientist and an artist, and throughout the years she guided me in learning about the world of science and the world of art. Years ago, she explained to me how the Inca irrigated their terraces in Machu Picchu and Tipon, and later she exposed me to the…
The Story of God
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” – John 1:1. There is no story there, things were final from the very beginning, everything else flows from that fixed point in the universe. Unless… there is a story, but it’s not so obvious. In his book,…
The Messenger Was Still Alive
You can live your whole life hearing a story and yet be unsure of its details. Every Romanian knows the name of Zalmoxis, the name appears everywhere, in magazines, on merchandise, around tourist attractions, yet it’s tricky to figure out what exactly this name refers to. Was Zalmoxis an ancient Dacian king? A god? A slave?…
Author Interview: Mindy Halleck on Remembered History
“I made the story complex because that’s how life is. It’s very complex. And in the middle of it, you laugh.” – Mindy Halleck Mindy Halleck is a Pacific Northwest novelist, short story writer, blogger and writing instructor. After her short story received Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest 76th Annual Competition Mainstream Literary Short…
Catch-22
Rewriting a manuscript requires reading other writers and learning from them new ways of using the language—unthinkable ways, uncomfortable ways, unlikely ways. This is a quick list of what I took away from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22.
Our Borders: Ageless Youth and Deathless Life (An Epilogue)
Once upon a time, there lived a king and a queen, both young and beautiful, but heartbroken because they couldn’t have children. They had tried everything, they went to doctors and philosophers, astrologers and soothsayers—all for nothing. They had lost hope when, one day, they heard of an old medicine man from a village not far from the castle, so they went to see him….
Our Borders: The Fork in the Road (1980)
“Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts!” “To this day,” Radu Codrescu said in 2006, “I have a feeling of guilt every time I cross a border. Even when I go from the US to Canada—and I have Canadian citizenship—or come back here [to Redmond, Washington], I feel guilty of something. As if I were…
Our Borders: The Last Voyage (1993)
“Let’s go look for them right now,” Radu said. “No,” the officer said, “you stay here. We’ll look for them. We know how to look for people like you.” OOCL Challenge, the transatlantic ship Radu Codrescu, 30, was on board of in January 1993, was heading into a storm, and Radu’s friends, Paul and Claudiu,…