At Sea

I live by the sea now. And mostly, I travel along one — up and down coastlines, both here in the US and abroad. It's a strange thing for someone who grew up entirely landlocked, in the flat, fertile northwest corner of Mississippi they call the Delta.

It was there, in a creative writing class taught by Mary Thompson, that I first found Ernest Hemingway. I fell for his clean, short, direct sentences — the way he could say so much by saying so little — and through him, for his adventures in the Caribbean and its waters. I didn't know it yet, but that class planted something. By the time I graduated from Ole Miss, also landlocked, I was already drawn toward the coast.