Essays

In 2005 I visited South Africa, and as part of the trip we took a jeep up the Sani Pass into Lesotho, the highest plain in sub-Saharan Africa. There I met a woman who lived in an isolated rondavel with her

I grew up hearing Boudreaux jokes—usually from Uncle Bubba or my pawpaw, who’d been waiting all evening for someone to give him an opening. If you’re not from Southeast Louisiana, you might mistake them for Cajun versions of the

I have never once been late because I am disorganized. At least not according to me. There is always a reason. Traffic. Construction. A phone call. An emergency. Something unexpected. If I’m late, I can immediately produce a detailed explanation involving

My great-grandmother, Granny-Great, had a poem she loved to recite. It wasn’t a lecture; it was only four lines. There was an owl lived in an oak. The more he heard, the less he spoke. The less he spoke,

Ostensibly, Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. He had a good publicist. Being friends with a writer is a dicey proposition. Sooner or later, you’

A priest I know once confessed that he has what he calls “a copy editor’s heart.” He wants to correct everyone’s mistakes. I laughed when he said it because I immediately recognized the impulse. Not in him. But in me.

So it turns out that I'm not the only one who learns things the hard way. Who knew? When I was attending college in Pittsburgh, an ex-boyfriend announced that he was flying to New Orleans to visit me over

We humans are pretty proud of our intelligence. We’ve built skyscrapers, landed on the moon, mapped the human genome, and carry more computing power in our pockets than NASA had during Apollo. And yet, sometimes we’re not so different from