Author Archives: Anita Sullivan

“We don’t understand this virus from the inside out. We don’t even know in what sense it is ‘alive.’ It seems not to have any means or purpose other than simply to continue. This reminds us of the story of the Welsh cauldron, into which dead soldiers could be tossed, where they would seethe and […]

“How could this precarious situation come to pass? That instead of climate change we humans might instead be finished off a bit sooner by a simple attack of a highly infectious disease we failed to prepare ourselves for. But we don’t see it that way yet because even here in Oregon, which has a fairly […]

“For me, it just takes a little Bach in the early evening, well played. For one thing, it’s so wonderful to listen to something unabashedly complex again, after being clubbed on the head with the daily twigs and sodden noodles of mildly ugly, innocently simple stupidity. Here is the work of a fellow human being […]

“I’m not really talking about painting at all, I’m talking about sketching. I don’t even own any paint except for a couple of cans stored in the garage and last opened five years ago to cover the walls in my bedroom. But I find myself thinking like a painter; I am seeing and feeling the […]

“Let’s imagine that silence roams our world and sometimes inhabits a segment of space/time, effectively blotting out any sound that was there previously. And as an analogy, poetry roams our world as an innately wordless being, which sometimes inhabits a group of words, effectively banishing any prior ‘narrative’ meaning and instead infusing the words with […]

“There we were, a bunch of strangers in a random field, all facing the same direction as if we were sitting on the beach. But our heads were tipped back and we were wearing these silly grey glasses that looked like we had cut them out of a coloring book. Almost as soon as we […]

“Isn’t there something deeply wrong with this picture? Yes, because it’s probably true. Those of us who take scientists like Guy McPherson seriously, we know the days of Happiness by Worm are on their way out. It’s enough to turn you into a raving maniac, into a person who comes out to yell at robins […]

“In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer did not really have a word for the human body. Not as a whole, only as an assembly of various limbs—and especially the ones that are routinely wounded in war. The ‘chest’ was one of those limbs, and about as close as he came to talking about the […]

“For years, I have kept a set of file folders in the back of the ‘General Reference’ drawer of my four-drawer, salmon-colored file cabinet, and inside these folders are classroom assignments for a perfectly wonderful imaginary class I am always preparing for, to let students know that the biggest secret about language is that it’s […]

“I pace my living room, imagining myself as a photographer: a person with a real, adjustable camera, a tripod, various lenses and light-focusing gimmicks (not too many), but nothing changes. There is nothing to keep the scene across my driveway from being just part of something larger that is flowing endlessly through streets and into […]