By a Nose

It's hard to write about home. There's just so much there, I find it hard to see the story. Maybe that's why Japan has been such a fertile setting for my fiction--I can see in the window clearly but I am still outside the glass. Childhood, though...I'm in the house, I am the house. There are no windows.

So I'm excited to have maybe done it, or at least attempted, to write a story about a place that's part of my past that actually, for a sentence or two here and there, captures that gut-based and wordless knowledge I have of the place.

The story, called "The Far Turn," is close to my heart not only because it was the last one I finished before shifting focus to my novel last year, but because it centers on the now-demolished Sportsman's Park racetrack, where I spent many magical summer nights in the grandstand as a kid, eating raspberry soft serve and "voting for" the gray ponies to win. Special thanks to my mom, who provided me with colorful details about Racetrack Rosie and The Genius, and who was there the night Jate Lobell busted the track record in one of the most memorable late-race moves in harness race history.