Published in Outside, November 1998 as “Scratch the Island from the Map”
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THE PLANE COMES EVERY TWO WEEKS–weather permitting. The flight out is five hours from the Coast Guard base at Kodiak Island in an old C-130 Hercules, around 1500 miles. If fog socks in the airstrip or the rain stalls over the tip of the chain or the williwaws are blowing, you’ve got a five hour trip back. Tom Gauntt, our pilot, thinks we’ve got a fifty-fifty shot this morning.
a speech for the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France
The subject I was asked to think about was the relationship between my writing and my country, the United States. At first I thought the question was too large to answer. After thinking hard about it, I came up with an even more impossible question: What do I feel about the United States? Do I love my country, like it, despise it, what?
ONE SUMMER NIGHT long ago at a writer’s conference, the novelist David Bradley and a few of his students were sitting around talking when he announced that he’d been researching a screenplay on the life of Otis Redding. This was before the CD reissues and boxed sets, so he was surprised, when he started singing the ballad “Dreams to Remember,” to find me harmonizing along with him.
IT’S A HALF-DAY PASS and Miss Crawford says it’s not a choice. It’s part of the pre-release thing. They want you to do things with your kid again to get them ready. Miss Crawford says it won’t be hard for me because I haven’t been gone that long. I’d like to say to her, how do you know, going home in that Acura every day–you can see it from the window in the upstairs can, all gold and brand new–but I just nod and say okay because I get to see Teresa and I’m not going to mess it up over her.
Published as “Endless Summer” in This Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, #14
for Paul Cody
THEY SAW ME AT THE LAKE, when I had the cast on, the one I made in the basement. They saw me messing with the trailer hitch. They came over.
“Hey,” they said, “need a hand with that?”
Guys and girls both, the young ones. That’s who went there.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 