March 10 was the last semi-normal day I remember. After an eye doctor appointment, I went back to work then stopped by the store on the way home because we needed toilet paper and bananas – nothing unusual there. The paper goods shelf was empty and when I checked out with my bananas the cashier wished me luck with the toilet paper search. Then everything got weird. I’ve spent the last five months of quarantine wishing we had a playbook, or a manual for how to navigate through

I remember the sound of typewriter keys on Saturday mornings. Dad would finish his Sunday school lesson by typing his notes on the old Royal, circa 1940-something. It’s a gray, metal machine that weighs about as much as a full box of encyclopedias. Every week he was teaching – which was most weeks – he hauled it back and forth from the kitchen to the spare bedroom. By the time I was in high school, he had moved up to an electric typewriter and retired the Royal to a quiet exi

I used to edit a print magazine, Mia. For three years, my publishing partners and I birthed a “baby” every three months and then proudly toted that baby around, holding her up and asking people to read her. Lots of people shared in our pride and joy, and they subscribed to the magazine. But the print publishing business is tough even if you have an excellent product, and so after 11 issues we decided to fold the print and transition to online. It took quite a while for us to

“My life was easy and I loved it.” These eight words are the opening to the heart-wrenching novella Angel Mountain. And it only gets better. “The glory of the country life is what I looked forward to every day. Perhaps that is why I am the oddball of my family.” Sentences like these continue for 15 pages, all lovingly crafted in single-space by punching the sticky keys of my father’s 1949 Royal typewriter. I was nine years old. The year was 1974. Now, almost four decades late