In my daughter’s recent graduation photos, I see her pose with friends and classmates from around the world—a vast and fascinating variety of colors and cultures, ethnicities and languages. As a holder of triple citizenship, she barely notices but instead integrates the differences into her multiverse. Amazingly, she’s never seemed to suffer from an identity…
In 1986 our family attended a Christmas Dolphins show at sunrise. While the military dictatorship in Chile hastened to its eventual demise, I was then a young mom living in a seaside hamlet where we still didn’t have telephones (or a bank, gas station, or pharmacy either, though that doesn’t enter into this story). But…
“Do you believe in destiny?” Nicolás Serrano, up to his elbows in apple mash, asks halfway through my first book Destiny at Dolphin Bay. His friend Melissa has questioned his self-identification as a Chiloé islander, knowing he grew up a city boy. As she watches him make cider in an antique press, she sees him…
The glory of God’s created world—the birds and beasts, flowers and trees—glistens as one of my favorite story motifs. Along with the sea and sky, I’m enchanted by mountains, meadows, and woodland marvels. As the hymnwriter Maltbie Babcock told his wife when heading for a walk along the Niagara Escarpment and Lake Ontario, l just…
Miles from home, we were locked out of our pickup, under torrential rain that hadn’t let up for more than a few hours in months. No family–no friends with vehicles–no co-workers within a three-hour drive. With two preschoolers in tow, I stood ankle-deep in mud and watched my husband, on homemade wooden crutches following major…
