Michael Kimball hits a three-run homer over the right fielder’s head. (for Michael Bowen) As a kid, I loved watching baseball on television, listening to it on the radio, and playing it anywhere that resembled a field. I could get completely lost in the game. It started when I was little and would hit those…

In the summer at my Cape house, I often invite — probably more like coerce — house and dinner guests to paint a 3×5” or 4×6” canvas to add to my “gallery,” a long hallway of small paintings affixed to the wall with Velcro and a staple gun. We paint on the deck on spread-out…

So, I walk. I try to name each sun-bright thing, memorize crepe myrtle by the National Federation for the Blind building, loose shingles off the Formstone-clad rowhouse three doors’ from mine — off by heart, saved for rainy days — only the starling drift and wren call catch me away. Forget the pit-bull mixes and…

I learned how to knit when I was eight. Most beginners start with a scarf and knit their rows back and forth. My mother started me on double pointed needles, which means I learned to knit in the round first. I knit a poncho for my Barbie. In memory it took me two years to…

My mother hands me two brochures: one for ballet and one for gymnastics. I don’t speak English—I am still new to America—but I understand enough to know that I am to choose. I choose tutus. + Thirty years later, I find myself in a PhD program for creative writing. I ask myself frequently, “What am…

“Fly fishing,” Wikipedia tells us, “is an angling method in which an artificial ‘fly’ is used to catch fish.” To catch fish so that s/he can then release them, the fly fisher(wo)man must make something artificial—feathers, fur, thread, a barbless hook—appear Real, a skill that involves getting things Right: the cast, the presentation, the fly…

“This could be one of the last good days of summer.” My husband and I start saying this in early August. Never mind that in Milwaukee, where we live, summer often stretches all the way through September. The sentence is code for: “Drop everything, let’s get out on the lake.” Another code phrase is, “Flat…

I was standing at a stoplight with a few MFA students after my fiction workshop let out, making small talk about how we were each planning to spend our Thursday evening. A group of them were getting ready to grab a quick bite at the student center before driving half an hour to hear our…

When I was five years old, I begged my parents to let me take piano lessons. No one else in the family was interested in the massive, old upright piano sitting in our living room. A converted player piano, I may have been as interested in the piano at that time—with its doors above the…

Josh Barkan at the peak of Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, in Morocco The writing life is one of paradox: We spend most of our time alone, but we need to connect with others to be able to write, to have a subject matter. I travel, perhaps, because it gives me a way…

Years ago, in the first apartment I rented by myself with no housemates, I killed all of my plants. It’s true. People who know me now find this hard to believe. And I must admit, it’s getting harder for me to believe it too. I don’t know that person as well as I used to.…

A recent meal I made for my wife: roasted chicken with wheat beer and orange gravy, molasses and orange-glazed carrots, and roasted brussels sprouts with red chile. + Remembering my earliest attempts at cooking, like remembering my earliest stories, makes me wince. A bad piece of writing can be revised, but only so much can…