Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Michael Wolcott, Peter Friederici, Laura Kelly, Margaret Erhart, Stacy Murison, and Katie King. This site includes archived columns from Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Darcy Falk, Kate Watters, Allison Gruber, and some guest writers. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Utah Alone
Afternoon slants toward sundown in the canyonlands of southern Utah. A storm front piles up against the Henry Mountains, painting the sky the colors of a fresh bruise. Wind-driven sand scurries over the pavement. Hardly anyone is around to see. Nobody lives on this stretch of Utah 24, which traverses some of the loneliest, most mind-altering real estate in America–a wonderland of sculpted sandstone monuments, broad slickrock flats, corkscrew slot canyons and endless stretches of starving desert scrub. Since leaving the interstate at...
read moreA Question of Humility
For once, there are a great many things in my life I’d rather not discuss. I don’t know how to describe the vast relational distance between my heart and anyone else’s. I can say it’s been a convergence of deluges from the past, present, and future. Again and again, I tire of explaining the same disappointments. I love people whose behavior I cannot reconcile with the stories they tell about themselves. And I’m tired of turning things I’ve survived into material. I have made a career, or something...
read moreMeditations on a Dough Scraper
In the drawer to the left of the kitchen sink here it is, the dough scraper from my dad. Made of cherry wood, polished smooth. The size and shape of a piece of toast. Did he know that one day, though not at the time he gave it to me, I would start making bread? That bread would become a regular winter project? Did I start making bread when I could no longer bear to leave that dough scraper unused, untried, untouched? We remember the giver when gift objects touch our skin. From my mother I have her wedding desk, a present from her cousin,...
read moreGreater Than Ten Percent
What a year to be teaching a class titled “Imagining the Apocalypse.” Barely three weeks into the fall semester, dire warnings came out from the creators of various companies of artificial intelligence who gathered to tell the tale of our demise via social media. According to The Guardian, several industry insiders warned that there was a “greater than 10 percent chance” that AI would cause human extinction by 2030. Some other insiders softened the blow by stating it would be the beginning of the end of humanity. I did what any...
read moreFalling Waters
The calendar read September, but the air was muggy and still when my wife and I had the good fortune this month to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of a house that is considered by more than one expert to be one of America’s greatest contributions to world architecture. It’s in Pennsylvania—deeply rural Pennsylvania, that is, where it has for almost 90 years now jutted out over the cascading creek locals call Bear Run. I’m not sure “jutted out” is really the right wording. When you’re standing on the bridge that’s needed...
read moreA Difficult Hope
We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. — Wendell Berry While much of the planet mourned for Dolly Parton last month, another vital American voice fell silent. Though not a household name, Wendell Berry was as important to the world of letters as Dolly was to the world of music. Berry, who died two weeks ago at 92, was a farmer-poet whose elegant writing helped to inspire the sustainable-agriculture and local food movements. In a...
read moreBehind Every Smile
Our family dentist, Dr. Handelman, was a burly fellow with movie star looks and thick fingers that didn’t easily fit inside a child’s mouth. The movie star looks were possibly what had clinched my mother’s decision in choosing the man—I often wondered if she chose him from a lineup—but he caused so much pain to her children that even in the waiting room she could hear our muffled cries of distress. These were the days when teeth, children’s teeth in particular, seemed to be made of cavities. There was novocaine, of course, delivered to the...
read morePatience
As I walked through a torrential downpour to move back into my campus office last week, I realized that I’ve been at what I consider my “new” teaching position for five years now. It felt like a big risk at the time to leave behind something I knew to leap into the unknown, also during a monsoon rain. But my past self did a great job recognizing that this transition had the potential not only to make me a better teacher, but also a better human. After five years, I’m not sure that I have an exact answer to what being a better human actually...
read moreLibraries large and little
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” –Dr. Seuss from his book, “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!” Two weeks ago, I was wending through an unfamiliar Munds Park neighborhood. My map app told me to turn left at the next street. I did. “Your destination is on the right,” it announced, and then I spotted it — a Little Free Library, one of about 85,000 dotted around the country. This one sat on the curb’s edge beside a cluster of recycling bins. It was a royal blue,...
read moreEpitaph for the Desert Cottonwoods
It must have been 1990 when I encountered the writing of Charles Bowden for the first time, not coincidentally when I first found myself traipsing around the Sonoran Desert in winter and early spring. For a young man from the suburban Midwest the scenery was a revelation: mountains stood like purple cardboard cutouts on dawn horizons, then transformed themselves into textured slopes of bright stone punctuated with saguaro exclamation points. In between creosote flats spread out so broadly that they seemed as much a mental exercise in how...
read more