Yale

I have just returned from a lovely visit to Yale University where I visiting Professor Leah Mirakhor’s writing class and then did a reading and talk at Ezra Stiles College. (At Ezra Stiles, I read from Immigrant, Montana and collected some valuable merch. An Ezra Stiles woolen scarf and thermos. Thank you for the opportunity, Professors Stephen Pitti and Alicia Camacho-Schmidt.) One of the things I talked about with Professor Mirakhor’s class was an essay of mine called “Flight.” It demonstrates the often-quoted axiom of John Berger’s: “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.” In other words, the truth of juxtaposition. In that essay, written in the days immediately after the attacks of 9/11,  I put beside the story of the hijacker the shadowy figure of the stowaway in order to tell a different tale about the tragedy of the world.