Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined ….

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His broth….

No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading..

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing..

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever pick….

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape..

Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth..

Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty..

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the f….

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival ….

What is kind of beautiful about Katrina is that even though the media and officials are working hard at telling us everyone in New Orleans was a mons….

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the sta….

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in….

It's all about a war of social impulses and beliefs that is as powerful in its way as a big hurricane..

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should s….

Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority; the underlying premise about human nature (to u….

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I li….

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in s….

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regula….

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies..

For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I l….