"I have a recording from the night I walked a street in central Tunis almost thirteen years ago. It is a few minutes long—a mess of car horns and people chanting in Arabic, a language I don’t speak. The date is October 20, 2011, and the people are celebrating the death of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya from 1969 until he was assassinated that morning."
“In 2017, I visited Fukushima on a travel grant from Columbia University’s MFA program to research why, six years after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami ravaged the eastern coast of Japan, 35,000 individuals continued to live in temporary housing. The small, prefabricated houses spread across the greater Fukushima Prefecture were quickly deteriorating. Tens of thousands of Japanese were in limbo, news sources insisted.”
“One thing to know about me is that I am an enthusiastic but terrible driver; I really only drive on assignment. On the Texas interstate that day in late 2020, heading north, my mind was filled with concerns over the rules of the road. I was filled, too, with a sense of nervous anticipation for what I would find in Killeen, who I might call once I made it there, and what I might learn from them and, if I got lucky, about myself. So I wasn’t paying much attention to the sloping landscape outside the rental car window, the flatlands that became rolling hills, the non-descript chaparral that flanked the lonely highway I was driving on.“
