“The narrator here tells us what will happen straight away—her mother will leave her behind for a man who is not her father—so it’s the journey that demands and rewards attention. Something is going on with the narrator, who has lost a lot of weight and is home on break from university, and she wants her mother to notice and help her. But like all parents, her mother is also a person of her own. It’s in the tension between the demands of the self on the other and the demands of the self on the self that this excerpt shines.” — Guest Judge Matthew Salesses
The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?
—Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Forever and Forever When I Move
A number of years ago, when I was still a teenager, my mother fell in love with a Mexican businessman and went with him from the foreign city where she and I had been on holiday, leaving me there alone. I was seventeen. We were in Oaxaca, a small city on the foothills of the Sierra Madre in southern Mexico. I remember how that first morning after I knew I’d been left, I went out onto the balcony hallway of our posada, which looked down into the courtyard, feeling as though overnight I had become as light and flimsy as a plucked feather, connected to nothing. It had taken all my strength to move myself back from the railing, whose boundary seemed insignificant, which I could have scaled in one motion. From the relative safety of my doorway, I held on, while below me, moving among the rampant greens and blooming things, a small child sang to herself in a hammock. As she sang, she swung; I could see only the tips of her feet swaying one way, then the other, her voice high, the Spanish words incomprehensible to me. After a while, a woman dressed in a bright blouse entered the courtyard from one of the private family rooms at the back of the posada and disappeared beneath the green canopy. When she emerged, the child was astride her, asleep in her arms, their twinning dark hair flashing in the sun.
I think of the girl’s body, released from its weight, moving through air; of her hot cheek pressed to the woman’s shoulder.
Be the girl or be the woman, you must choose. Be the girl’s body, the back of her head nesting in the warm curve of her mother’s neck. Or be the mother, arms aching, her mouth watering for the mango on the tree. But she has no hands to pluck it.
* * *
Traveling to Oaxaca for Christmas was a way for us to pass the holiday without my father, who was on sabbatical that year in London, doing research on a University grant at the British Library, and my brother, Jack, who was a first-year medical resident and couldn’t get the time away. In a few days, after Oaxaca, my mother and I would fly to England to meet up with my father for a week. We had little or no expectations of the trip to Mexico, my mother and I. We’d never been to Mexico; we’d never been anywhere just the two of us. We were a family of middle-class means, and travel abroad was a luxury I had not experienced. I could not fathom how they had suddenly found the money for it. I was home from my first semester at college, which by all measures had been a dismal failure, although my parents didn’t yet know this. I had missed my parents terribly that fall, a development I’d been too surprised and ashamed to admit; and had felt unequal both to the college pressures and the independent life, crumbling quickly beneath their weight. I had eventually failed to participate in any of the school’s activities, whether encouraged or mandated. Home from school for the winter break, I had spent the days before Oaxaca lying on my bed in a stupor as though my failure had required both commitment and stamina and had worn me utterly out; and tried to organize the frayed threads of my life into some gatherable substance I might hand over to my parents to mend like the ripped shreds of an unwearable garment.
I had wanted my mother to rescue me. I felt sure she would; she always had. I wanted her to accomplish this by intuiting my feelings and explaining them to me, as I myself could neither name them nor understand them yet suffered their inchoate properties. But if she had comprehended any of this, she’d chosen not to speak of it, so that when we embarked upon our journey I’d felt no more seen by her than when I’d been away at school.
Her seeming indifference enraged me, heightening my solitude and the darkness of my unshakable mood. In retaliation for what felt like her deliberate neglect, I relinquished to her all responsibility for getting us to our destination, and merely obeyed her instructions like an old dog, rising before dawn to drive with her, mutely, through a record freeze to the airport, shivering unspeaking beside her on the shuttle bus from long-term parking to the terminal. If she noticed my mood, she did not let on.
Airborne, we lifted through the dark sky above the Pioneer Valley, whose forests thatched the mountain sides like bristly hair upon a beast, and I thought of how I’d stood, the last day before the end of the school term, by the side of Lake Michigan, where the waves had frozen in copious shards of ice along the shore like the teeth of some abominable monster rising from the water to eat the city. On the plane I promptly slept, the one thing I could still do well, and was not entirely awake when we entered the terminal in Mexico City; consequently, I could not save us from my mother’s ineptitude with Spanish signage, so that we immediately took a wrong turn on our way to change planes and found ourselves abruptly outside of security and late for our new gate. We pleaded for special treatment and consequently got none. When finally we reached the X-ray machines, Mexican security confiscated my mother’s nail scissors, though they’d survived the recent post-9/11 TSA measures in the U. S., and sent us on our way, but we’d already missed our flight. By the time we eventually reached the Oaxaca tarmac, still hot under our feet though the sun had set, we were exhausted and did not speak with each other or the other passengers in the shared taxi to our posada.
I think of that missed plane now and then. If not for that, we might never have met Mateo to begin with.
* * *
Although my mother, before we left the States, had been unusually brooding and inattentive, in Oaxaca she became instantaneously transformed. She awoke that first morning in our apricot-colored room vibrating with impatience, while I dragged myself upright. “Hurry,” she said. “Breakfast is almost over.”
I rushed through my ablutions in the shiny orange bathroom, and, shy before her, dressed in there, too. When finally I emerged, she was already by the door, eager to enter the green world awaiting us in the posada’s courtyard below, where the fumes of diesel and chocolate wafting in from the street combined in the courtyard’s air with plumeria and roasting pork into a saturated perfume I can still recall, any part of which encountered now sends me instantly there. Although it would be fair to say that at that time in my life I found other people intolerable, it made no difference to me to discover, when we entered the breakfast room, that we were assigned to a table with other guests, as I had no intention of talking to them in any case and felt no obligation to do so.
The two women wore matching fleeces, their blonde hair cut similarly short. They stopped eating as we sat, grinning the way Americans do.
“Addie,” my mother introduced herself, shaking their hands. “This is my daughter, Mina.”
But I did not shake their hands, instead lifted my napkin from beneath my fork to spread it with laborious care across my lap, and promptly forgot their names. “What brings you here?” my mother asked.
“Christmas, of course,” the smaller woman offered, tilting her head. “We heard they do it especially well.”
“Last year it was Amsterdam,” the other one said. She was plain with a broad forehead and long chin.
“Awesome in the snow. Beastly cold though,” the first one observed. “We adored the frozen canals.”
“The skating.”
“The twinkle lights.”
“But we thought: Dude, something warmer this year.”
“Much warmer. More—exotic.” The two women looked at each other and laughed. “Oh, Bitsi,” the second one said.
“Never been anywhere in Meh-hee-co,” Bitsi said. “It had never occurred to us before, like, one day it simply wasn’t there and the next—poof! Meh-hee-co.”
I gave my mother a sidelong glance, who tapped my shin admonishingly under the table with her sandal.
“What about you?” the second woman asked. “Why here, why Christmas?” She and Bitsi leaned forward in anticipation of whatever juicy story we might offer.
For a moment my mother looked as though she might give them one. Finally—“Well, Delia, why not here?” she shrugged, and no, we too had never been anywhere in Mexico before, despite its having resided to the south of the United States our entire lives. The laugh snorted from me before I could stop it, and again my mother tapped me under the table.
Eggs arrived, strips of bacon, a heap of black beans. “What’s on your agenda today?” Delia asked.
My mother tasted her eggs and added salt. “Monte Albán.” “Oh, us, too! We could split a taxi, maybe hire a guide.”
“Although we wouldn’t want to impose ourselves,” Bitsi said. “Just—you know, if you two were looking for company. Or something. I mean, we have no idea what we’re doing here, and maybe you don’t either and we could all thrash around together. If you wanted.”
“No pressure,” said Delia, smiling openly like a person who’d never been rejected.
“Oh, well,” Mom said quickly. “We’re going to wander into town a bit first, look into some of the craft stores in the main square—”
“The zócalo,” Bitsi said.
“—But we’re really not sure of our timing today. We’re trying to be—”
“Spontaneous,” I blurted.
“—For once in our lives.”
“Oh, sure, sure. Well, maybe we’ll run into you out there.”
“Not if we see you first,” I mumbled into my napkin, and was rewarded with another kick on the ankle.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Bitsi said to me, looking at my uneaten plate of food.
I felt my face go hot. “I don’t like Mexican food,” I told them, relieved when they burst into laughter and left me alone.
* * *
We’d had no plan to wander the zócalo, but now felt obligated, or my mother did, lest she be caught out in a lie, something I cared nothing about, and so we set out in the warming sun directly from the breakfast room.
“You didn’t want to join them, did you?” my mother asked.
“God no.”
“We don’t need anyone else.”
“Certainly not them.”
She squeezed my hand quickly and I looked at her, grateful. She hadn’t done that since I’d been home. When she released it, I hitched up my jeans, far too big around the waist, but I’d used up all the holes in my belt.
The walk was brief and through a series of quiet residential neighborhoods built up around the historic district. For a while the sidewalks were nearly empty, but as we got closer to the center of town pedestrian traffic picked up, and soon we were passing men with wheeled carts selling sweetened shave ice on the street corners and women proffering baskets of deep-fried, rust-colored morsels which, closer up, resolved into grasshoppers. Skinny dogs wandered up and down the sidewalks, their noses to the ground. Piles of piñatas in multitudinous shapes and colors spilled from the open doorways of the shops, whose dark interiors seemed both welcoming and discreet, as though we, too, might engage in private things deep inside the hushed rooms. Peering into the dark felt vaguely forbidden, but it was only solitary shop owners arranging bolts of cloth, or women chattering as they had their hair permed, the stink of it wafting to the sidewalk.
At the end of every avenue, the mountain range hovered beneath puffy clouds, its peaks twice the elevation of Oaxaca City, and although in this part of town the streets were flat, both of us were breathing heavily, though we were only walking, and not fast. I wished then to be a swimmer, who, I imagined, training from a young age, would have developed enormous lungs, her ribcage permanently expanded. How like that the people of Oaxaca must be, through generations adapting to their mountain home, their bodies fitted to its demands: short in stature, their torsos squared off and filled with giant lungs and hearts—drawing their chests in my mind, picturing how I would sketch their organs in charcoal.
I had shown myself, that fall, to be utterly unadaptable. Always too much or too little, I’d been plump and hyperactive as a child and now, at 17, found myself both scrawny and overcome by lassitude. No one else lost weight in freshman year. While my classmates stuffed themselves at late- night pizza parties or devoured the eggrolls they’d warmed in illegal toaster ovens hidden in their closets, I had fought back a growing nausea, for the first time in my life bereft of appetite. During meals when everyone else was at the cafeteria, I’d passed the time lying on the floor of my dorm room like an orphan ferreted away in an attic, hidden from sunlight, feeding on papery moths and the carcasses of centipedes. By Thanksgiving I could count my every rib, and dark circles under my eyes reminded me of a zombie—sitting naked before a cheap mirror I propped against the bureau drawers to sketch my own skeleton during exam week when I should have been prepping Italian, my snarled hair long and drooping to my ribs. My body did not seem to be my own. I could not recognize it as myself, nor even feel myself within it.
What would my parents say when they saw my grades? Not even As in my art classes, though, like my brother, I’d excelled in high school. I did nothing but draw through the long days, but couldn’t somehow get dressed, leave the room, and walk across campus to turn things in.
My mother, strolling cheerfully beside me, plucking the strap of her purse like a guitar, knew none of this. So far she hadn’t mentioned my appearance, though I had seen, when I arrived home for break, the look of shock on her face. Yet she did not ask me what was wrong; she, who had known and managed my business throughout my life with both diligence and enthusiasm, did not inquire about a single thing or even seem to recognize that I’d both been gone for months and now was home.
And I myself did not understand what was wrong with me. I wanted to study, wanted to eat; I wished I could. But my brain seemed fixed on incoherence, my appetite steadily diminishing until every bite sent my stomach cramping, gave me headaches regardless of the kind of food. I was allergic, it seemed, to sustenance itself.
* * *
At the zócalo I put my hand on my mother’s arm. “I’m exhausted,” I told her. “Can we sit?” We found a table at an outdoor café and she ordered two hot chocolates without asking me what I wanted. The day was nearly as hot as the drinks when they arrived, thick, flavored with almond. Outside a chocolate factory on our walk in, we’d passed bins of orange cacao pods waiting to be unloaded. They looked like Da Vinci’s sketches of the human womb in my art history textbook, which he’d drawn bereft of host: womb after womb like giant milk-weed pods floating in space, their curled fetuses tiny aliens sent from the burning stars.
We watched the activity in the square and didn’t talk. Pedestrians strolled the wide white Plaza de Armas, where beds of red poinsettias for Christmas surrounded the leafy green trees and iron gazebos. In the northeast corner, the 18th-century cathedral baked in the sun with its doors closed, before which a child pulled a plastic turtle on orange wheels back and forth, endlessly. No snow in sight for Christmas. No snow, no father, no brother; as though Christmas itself had been canceled and, with it, any expectation of family unity. I could not understand how my parents had let such a thing happen.
Before us a group of workers was setting up a grid of platforms in the square around the planters and trees. “What are they doing?” my mother asked our waiter, gesturing. “Que pasa?”
He seemed surprised that we needed to ask. “Es la Fiesta de los Rábanos, esta tarde.”
“Rábanos?”
The waiter shrugged—“Rábanos, rábanos”—and mimed a long, thick object until my mother blurted a laugh and covered her mouth. “He couldn’t possibly be saying what I think he is.”
“Mom!”
“Radish,” said a man at the next table. “He means the Radish Festival, it’s why most of the tourists are here now.”
The man who had spoken sat back into the shade, one tidy leg crossed over the other at the knee. He was remarkably handsome, his moustache and wavy hair thick and black. He leaned back in his chair, his smile friendly and frank. I knew exactly who he was. “Oh,” my mother said, “we know you.”
“From the airport, the shared taxi van,” he said. Suddenly his brown eyes were on me, his smile deepened, and I looked away. “You’re staying at Chencho’s.”
“That’s right,” my mother said.
“I’m at Casa Lydia, his sister’s posada. It’s on the other side of the square.” He gestured to the north, where the streets above the central square climbed the foothills into the mountains. “Are you exploring town today?”
“Apparently,” my mother said, laughing. “It wasn’t quite our plan.” He smiled inquiringly.
“This is stupid,” I said. “Let’s just go.” I pushed away my glass of hot chocolate, still full, although my mother had drained her own.
“Right. Can’t let those Oregon women dictate our day.” She turned back to the man. “Perhaps we’ll run into you again.”
“That does seem to happen in Oaxaca,” he said, breezily waving his hand. When I looked back, he was watching me, smiling as though we shared a secret.
* * *
We drove at once by taxi out of town to the Monte Albán ruins, following for a few miles a rusted- out pick-up truck carrying a wire pen full of pigs. One of the pigs, its hooves awkwardly splayed, glanced back through the windshield at us, seeming to observe, one by one, the taxi driver, my mother, myself, a look of abject misery on its spotted face. Around the animals, traffic roared, hot fumes filled the air. I covered my nose with my hand, breathed through my mouth. I regarded the pigs, thinking how my mother and I had been served tocino that morning, which my mother had eaten with relish, a special treat for her. At her urging, I had taken a bite, but found its crisp piggy- ness nearly impossible to swallow. It had scraped down my throat.
We’d climbed another thousand feet in our taxi to reach Monte Albán, and now, out of the taxi, sucked at the hot air. From the plateau the entire valley could be seen, the scrubby mountains folding into the foothills in waves of green and brown. At the ticket counter, we declined the paid tour and instead wandered, fully ignorant, across the dying grass, among the pyramids and stone plinths, beneath the killing sun, our faces burning, the guidebook, marked with my mother’s thumb, unread. My mother, uncharacteristically cavalier, had done little research before arriving, almost no research at all even in choosing Oaxaca for our vacation; I hadn’t even known we were coming until the week before, hadn’t known we wouldn’t be spending Christmas at home, although my parents had known, I gathered, for weeks.
Before the incoherent blocks of stone grouped by dark doorways and looming behind adjacent walls, we stood to catch our breath. Men, or animals, carved into the rocks stared out at us, their faces fierce with ecstasy or pain, I could not tell, their bodies torqued, their genitals sometimes mutilated, sometimes gruesomely fantastical—penises curving into waving curlicues like the tails of those pigs. My mother paged through the guide, began to read aloud, but in the heat, laboring for breath, I could not bring myself to absorb even a scrap of information, and finally went to sit, exhausted, at the bottom of the steep stairs to the southern platform while other tourists, hardier than me, climbed the stairs.
I hung my head between my knees, nauseated and faint.
“You’re only 17,” my mother said, coming to sit beside me. “I’m nearly three times that. You should be climbing these stairs, not passing out.”
“That’s helpful.”
“I’m trying to wake you up! What in the world, Mina?”
“So now all of a sudden you want to know?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
I shrugged and turned away.
“You’ve become anorexic.”
“Since you’re an expert?”
I heard my mother sigh, felt her hand on my back. “I’m just concerned.” She stopped talking to draw in a series of deep breaths. “—And also out of shape,” though she seemed to me as fit as she’d always been.
The dizziness subsided and I sat up. Beside me, my mother gathered her thick brown hair, struck through with grey, and twisted it off her neck, securing it with a clip from her purse. “That’s better,” she said, and leaned back against the steps. The sun was relentless. I closed my eyes against it once more. “Still,” she said, picking up the conversation, “I do think we should talk about it. I had wanted to give you the space to bring it up on your own, but you don’t seem inclined that way.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“That seems unlikely.”
Then the light was abruptly blocked and a voice said, “I told you we’d meet again.”
I opened my eyes to the mustached man from the café, who surely was following us. Had we said where we were going? Maybe he had stalked us from the square, bribed a driver.
“You!” my mother exclaimed with a tone—bubbly, light—I’d never before heard issuing from her. “Confess,” she said to him, “you’ve been paying Chencho to learn where we’re going.”
He held up his hands in resignation. “Otherwise there’d be no reason to come to Monte Albán. Who needs pre-Columbian ruins? Been there; done that.”
“You could have shared a taxi with us.” I stared at her.
“But I didn’t know your destination,” he said, suddenly winking at me, and my face went hot. I was aware of my body then, and my embarrassment. He was as close to my mother’s age as to mine. I fixed my gaze on his knees and waited to see what he would do next.
His name was Mateo, he told us, he lived in Mexico City. He was here in Oaxaca on business. I studied his tidy toes in his open sandals, his hands set on his hips, his splayed fingertips. I noticed how, beneath his thick mustache, his lips came together in a point as he spoke—turning my face quickly away when he glanced, my chest burning.
“I hope you’ll save us from our ignorance,” Mom said. “We’ve no idea what we’re looking at.”
“Oh, well,” he laughed, waving his hand, “Very old here, just as old there, extraordinary, ruined civilization. All right?”
He grinned at me. My stomach dropped.
“Join us?” my mother said.
With nervous anticipation I waited for him to sit down beside me, but instead he sat beside my mother.
My mother was not surprised. I watched, disbelieving, as they smiled at each other, as she leaned back once more onto her elbows against the steps in her thin blue t-shirt, stretching her slim legs, bare and freckled as they emerged from beneath her denim skirt, and crossing them at the ankle, like a preening teenager—the thought coming at me with a sickening speed as Mateo’s gaze followed their unfolding. And she was attractive, I knew, with her petite, athletic good looks, her large green eyes and the scattering of freckles across her nose. I stared at her and tried to absorb what was taking place before me.
It was absurd. It was gross.
“Mom, let’s go to the burial mounds,” I said, standing and waving the pamphlet at her. “They’re over on the other side, in the shade.”
“Task master,” she chided me, making a visor of her hand and squinting across the football field of trampled brown grass between us and the far side of the plateau where the museum blocked the view of the mounds. She stood. “Off we go,” she sang, which was not at all the way to dispense with our visitor. We set out, my irritation rising as Mateo slipped on his sunglasses and strolled beside us as though we’d arrived together.
“Oh, no,” my mother whispered, “don’t look now.”
Across the plateau, Delia and Bitsi, the ditzy couple from breakfast, had paused in a tour group before a carved façade, their matching fleeces now tied around their waists in the heat. We had nowhere to hide, and soon enough Delia had spotted us and commenced an enthusiastic waving, whereupon Bitsi turned and likewise waved. They could hardly be ignored and my mother lifted her arm in a gesture that said hello and goodbye with one flick of the wrist. Then Mateo stepped into the sightline and we hurried onward.
We were sweating copiously by the time we reached the museum. “Perhaps a lemonade before we see the dead people?” Mateo said.
“I’m good,” I told him, quickly laying my hand on my mother’s arm. “Let’s just go, Mom, we can get lemonade after.”
“Not I,” she said. “I’m thoroughly dehydrated and you probably are too. Let’s sit, consume cold liquids.” Mateo and my mother took a step toward the museum’s dark doors. “Mina?” she said.
I looked at the two of them, standing before the doors, giving the appearance for all the world of a couple: they even dressed the same. And if still I hadn’t received the message, then surely Mateo lifting his hand and placing it not quite on my mother’s back but on the air hovering above it as he opened the heavy door, would have made me see it. “I’ll meet you at the mounds,” I told them. “I want to wander.”
My mother gave me an indulgent smile, a gesture that told me I was as transparent as an aquarium; she thought it was the lemonade I objected to. “See you in a bit,” she said. I didn’t hear what Mateo said next, but my mother laughed, touching a palm to her upswept hair, as together they entered the building.
* * *
Past the museum the plateau tilted upward and I followed the path toward the green mountains rising in distant layers above the dry valley. If I’d had a friend with me, someone my own age, or even my serious brother, then maybe I wouldn’t have cared so much about Mateo—about his interest in my mother and my embarrassment, which had felt, in the moment, like a humiliation; or cared about his interference in our holiday—or at least I imagined that would have been so. Maybe then I could have been utterly indifferent to him, indifferent as well to my mother, as I had never once been. But in the few months since I’d last seen them, my high-school friends seemed already utterly of another world, and I hadn’t kept the new ones I’d made during the first weeks at college.
Straining for breath, I headed for a scattering of trees where the map promised the burial mounds could be found. The path narrowed, continued uphill, splitting into a series of narrower paths where it met the mounds in the near distance, but already I hadn’t the breath for it, or perhaps the mind for it. Back home in New England, the landscape was a frozen grey bank, bereft of margin, and for a moment I tried to summon its cold, to feel it in my bones. But I felt nothing but hot, dizzy, increasingly stupid, and so for a while I sat beneath the shade of a wide tree, waiting for my mother, pulling breath into my body with conscious effort. I had my satchel; in it was my sketch pad, a multitude of pencils and pastels, but I had no energy even to open it. Head dropped back, I examined the branches of the tree above me spread like the endlessly forking bronchioles of the lungs, which I had drawn at school that fall in my human anatomy class when I should have been learning vocabulary—hours spent staring at the brilliant color photos in my textbook, cross-sections of preserved human lungs: the frilly branches splitting from the bronchi; how like leaves were the multitudinous alveoli, each bearing its own tiny portion of air. That was how I thought of them, anyway: trees and lungs on a continuum of breathing apparatuses. But the branchings of my lungs now seemed to me more like the endlessly divergent tunnels of a deep cave, submerged in water, through which I must swim to find each pocket of air trapped in the farthest back regions of my own self, swamped in darkness. It seemed impossible, the more I strained to fill my lungs, that such mechanisms gave life. To believe it seemed a delusion. Yet live I did.
I got to my feet. All at once I felt overcome by claustrophobia, though I stood within the open sky. Something was about to happen, something awful, the sensation coming upon me like the breath of doom. Then the world dimmed, a buzzing filled my brain and I sat, or, really, fell, hard back to the ground, unaware of myself then for I don’t know how long—a split second, an hour. Then the world once again brightened and I found I was sitting up, gulping at the hot air and planting my hands in the dirt until the buzzing stopped.
Still my mother had not come.
Again I stood, slowly this time, testing my balance. I brushed off my jeans and headed back to the museum, at the top of which, projecting off the building, was a balcony terrace I hadn’t seen on my way out, crowded with diners at their mid-day meals, amongst whom I easily saw her pale blue tee, his blue button-down—there they were, my mother, that man: sitting together under a canvas umbrella, a tableau, a diorama, framed by magenta bougainvillea, plates of food beside their glasses. They were eating lunch without me. They hadn’t waited for me, and probably never had any intention, I understood at last, of joining me in the burial mounds.
Stunned, I stopped walking. For a moment they seemed suspended not only in air but in time, as though I had just returned from a long trip underground and was looking upon them months into the future, seeing what they had become.
S. P. Donohue’s work has been published widely in literary magazines, including the Michigan Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Poetry Magazine, Threepenny, and the New England Review. She received her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford before joining the faculty at Northwestern University, where she teaches creative writing and advises undergraduates.