Cowboy in Sweden

For the first time in my life I would be an official roadie. I wasn’t merely in charge of the driving: I would also help build and dismantle, lift and position, carry and fetch — armed with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. My writing would be full of self-mockery and rich with funny observations about my wife. Moreover, having experienced the splendor of the gig, my dispatch would be transformed, alchemically, into an essay that contained a series of pointed, even revolutionary, observations about art.

Love and Wizkid

The album gives me space to imagine beautiful places and sappy romantic love. It gives me the space to imagine intentional rest that does not imply lockdown, to imagine interactions with people that don’t signal death, and to imagine a healthy, abundant sex life that I have yet to experience.

Highway Star

Trucking saved her, she said, but she still got lonely. Solitude became its own source of claustrophobia. “I have blue days,” Jess said. “If I slammed my truck into a mountain, would anyone notice? Does anyone know I’m out here?”

Finding Form

Writing fiction hadn’t been false, for nonfiction isn’t truer than fiction; but I’d seemed to row at the shallowest region of the narrative stream, where the water wouldn’t reveal its deepest enchantments. I needed to allow the subject to change the form as I progressed. Where I began with curiosity about my uncle’s fate, my travels made me aware of how little of the war had been monumentalized in the Nigerian landscape, ultimately making it necessary for me to define the shape of my work as a reconciliation with the fragmented nature of the past.