“The desert tests the faith of even the most committed. When I received orders to deploy here, I imagined sand dunes and shimmering heat.”

“A duck’s disappearance figures in history’s rising action only obliquely. A mass death that only enlivens a larger dramatic structure. It is setting; it is not scene.”

“In hindsight, I see the event as strange, a random act of violence from which no lesson can be drawn.”

“This is the Delta, where you can look and look but find no visible demarcation line between the salt waters and the fresh waters.”

“There is a feeling like the liquid at the top of an overfilled glass, taut and quivering. I think of that feeling as my feeling, my go-to.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

“That’s how I lived through--no--I survived that harsh winter in solitary confinement. It gave me the mental strength to push forward through any situation I faced in the future.”

“I realize that my experiences of Gaelic are like the view from the door of my basement apartment: a sliver of sky and the row houses across the street. I can never see the whole world that way. Yet Gaelic gives me many glimpses into worlds just beyond.”

“So, I fashion from her missteps a different kind of compass, revealing where a teller of stories should tread compassionately, inquisitively, conscientiously—or not at all.”