My Blog
Truth in a Memoir
How to let go of one’s mother? How to let her die after the magnitude of years during which she was the boulder that our roots have clamped themselves over and around, absurdly daring follicles unwittingly holding her at the center of our being? Then converging beyond...
The Impact of a Word Choice
How would it be for you if I insisted on calling you by the wrong name, and also used that name to insist on telling the world that you are what you are not? The word is “Mormon.” The entire world, including “Mormons” themselves, refer to the members of the Church of...
The Value of Memoirs in a World Without Portraits and Vanity
I recently learned that Amish people do not take or keep family photographs or painted portraits. They have no photos of themselves, their parents, grandparents and children as they grow up, their weddings, births and funerals. I was in Amish country recently. I tried...
“Unseen Worlds” and the Impulse behind the Book
Unseen Worlds is a spiritual memoir--the story of my spiritual journey. Its trajectory is traced from the beginning of life—my life interconnected with Haiti's--and includes significant influences on me come from people, events, or my birth island's history. A memoir...
Man Nini
Man Nini From "Crossroads and Unholy Water" Man Nini was queen of the coal kitchen, standing within six square feet of soot, in front of four pits glowing with embers, churning the bubbling bean sauce, beaming the yellow kernels of her smile at the chickens flapping...
Dame Marie
… One hears that men from Jeremie have pretensions to a kind of inspired singularity; they often succeed at it. It is one of those who, in the evening, at an Auberge Inn table, told me what he knew of Gustave’s death, and this man, himself looking like a great grasshopper of a man wearing full clothes, and seen to fold his long, dry limbs over a din-maker of a motorcycle which he hangs onto like some insects do onto their wings;