Love and Patience on Mount Pico (2023)

“‘Are you sure this is a road?’ Samantha asked as the black basalt paving gave way to dark, red dirt, and the deep-green grass seemed to grow closer and closer to our rental car.

‘It’s supposed to be the fastest way,’ I answered. ‘According to Google Maps...’

Then I realized I’d lost the cell signal and my iPhone was navigating blind. We were trying to get to the guide house for an ascent up Mt. Pico on the eponymous island in the Azores.”

Published in The Write Launch

Through the Gates of My Ancestral Island (2023)

Approaching the Azores from the air seems unnatural, for descending upon them in such a way, a bird’s eye view, if you will, removes the sheer verticality of the islands as they thrust up out of the flat plane of the sea. Seen from above, the nine islands of this archipelago are also wildly out of scale; they seem smaller, confined as they are by the surrounding ocean waters; one loses the sense of power the islands convey when approached by sea. Upon the perspective of the slightly undulating level horizon of the ocean, with its ephemeral liquidity, you can see how everything on the island is, in contrast, solid and vertical, rising upwards, no, thrusting upwards, instilling a sense of its violent birth.

Published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature

JOHN FANTE, FRANCESCO DURANTE, AND LITERARY ISLANDS (2020)

The death of his friend, the Italian writer, Francesco Durante, causes the author to reflect upon their work together publishing John Fante's books in Italy, planning an aborted biography of the Italian-American novelist, and the relationship between literary islands, such as Capri and the Azores.

Published in Schuylkill Valley Journal

Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility (2023)

“‘One can be born on an island in two ways,’ wrote the Angolan Azorean poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. ‘From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.’ Like Pinto, I’m feeling the ‘burning torch’ of connection to the islands of the Azores and find myself growing deeper and deeper entwined in the cords of my tangled roots there. And, it seems, the more I try to resist it, the tighter those cords bind me.”

Published in Barzakh Magazine

THE ART OF LOSING: LOVE LIVES OF ELIZABETH BISHOP (2016)

A review of two films about Elizabeth Bishop published in basalt.

Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley (2023)

On a chilly late-April morning, just a few days before Earth Day, Ben Nickley steadily makes his way uphill through a shrubby woodland at Jug End State Reservation. It’s early, when birds are most active, and the footpath is muddy from the spring rains. Nickley is on his way to set up mist nets. A bag slung over his shoulder holds tools and materials he will need when the birds begin to hit the nets; two members of his crew head down to the wetlands to set up more nets there. This is the second spring of bird banding that Nickley has launched as part of a biodiversity survey of the South Taconic Range by Green Berkshires.

Published in Berkshire Magazine