At Civitella, I let my mind wander—through the castle and gardens, through wide open time and newfound ideas. It’s a rarity for artists and writers to have such complete untethered freedom. When I sat down to write, I was easily pulled to the barely palpable gossamer separating us from our ideal works. I could feel the shapes within shifting and growing. There was and will be much to say.

Excerpt from Bangkok Wakes to Rain

 She is a child or a few thousand years old. Would it ever matter? The city will stay this way for her. When she was a uniformed primary schooler herself, walking home along these very streets, she liked to make believe she was a bewildered traveler in a foreign city, drawn forward by alluring strangeness. She couldn’t have known then that there would be years ahead when she didn’t have to pretend, and years still further ahead when pretending was all she could do. Fresh, fresh, hot, hot, good for kids, delicious for grown-ups, twenty bahts, twenty bahts. She counts on hearing the soy milk lady’s singsongy cry ahead of the others. The thicker the crowd on the sidewalk, the louder the hawkers call out. Stampedes of dusty shoes and shopping bags and stray dogs crisscross near the ground; canopies of sun-shielding umbrellas and twisty headphone cords drift above. The fruit sellers have laid parrot-green pyramids of pomelo on their tables. They holler, “Come, pretty young sister! Come sample this!” and she tells them maybe tomorrow, knowing they’ll be at the same spot to greet her the next morning as she hurries to catch the 6:45 at the Skytrain station. Auntie Tofu, Uncle Big Mouth, the Egret: she doesn’t know their real names, only the monikers her mother mentioned when boasting of discounts negotiated at the produce scale. The vendors pick up halved mangosteens to show off the white flesh balled inside like an unbloomed flower. It’s about the time of the year when these particular fruits become more plentiful, though that wasn’t always the case, especially during the calamitous years-lifetimes ago it seems-when orchards drowned and few trucks dared brave watery roads to deliver what little of the crop had been saved. Those days are hardly worth remembering, are they? Everything is now back in its place.