Author: KCF

I am drawn to the things I cannot see

Listen to the full piece here: When she was younger, Amelia was chosen to be the Beauty Queen of her local shooting club in Baradero, Argentina. In the 1990s, with her children out of the house, she and her husband moved to Buenos Aires, where there was more to do. “I was always brimming with…

I could have ambled slowly over — a way of hedging my bets — but I knew instinctively that everyone had a role to play in this little drama. Just then mine was to come up short, stand forlorn in their swirling backwash and let my pack fall to the ground in desperation. I played…

He heard their voices on the far shore. He couldn’t make out the words exactly; instead the sounds came as imperfect, jumbled packets of energy over the water: the soft patter of distant conversation, an excited shriek that echoed, a gaggle of voices around a bonfire, celebrating.  He stood still listening to those voices, wanting…

Growing up in California, I was a fan of the French writer Jean Giono whose books were published in beautiful simple editions by North Point Press, a local literary press. He wrote about this very land and it’s people. Little did I know that later in life, this region would become part of my own…

My ancestors were a jumbled mix: there were doctors, an immigrant who became an industrialist, a journalist who migrated from the East Coast to California on bicycle, hard-working, long-suffering Irish stock that toiled in Nebraska and Kansas. There are high achievers, ne’er-do-wells and some outsiders like myself who took a more meandering path.

With his beard and his yellowing teeth and his paunch always sticking out from under his shirt Harry’s been letting go for a long time but that night I loved him more than ever for going along and trying to make me happy even if we all know it won’t make a bit of difference.

Writing is rather the act of listening carefully. If you listen well enough, the words present themselves like a mist rising from the forest floor. They do not need your assistance; they need your silence. If you don’t scare them off, they come of their own accord like the little creatures in the forest that…

For thirty years now, his days had started with his putting words into notebooks. An uncharitable reviewer had once described him as “a minor poet” and it had stung at the time. But over the years — and with no ensuing rise in his stature to disprove that reviewer, he had come to embrace the…