“No Cover in Tucson,” a vignette about my visit to the Southwest as a love-starved Alaskan in 2005, is featured in the current issue of Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim. A PDF of the issue is available for download through the journal’s website; hard copy can be ordered online. It’s a fine issue full of established and emerging talent from the far north. The radio version of this piece is also available in the nonfiction samples page of Uncanny Vale. It first aired on KXCI Tucson’s Broad Perspectives in 2007.
It’s interesting to look back on this piece, written before my move to Tucson seven years ago, and ponder how my time in this place has affected me. I feel habituated to its tendency to lay me bare. I’ve grown accustomed to shedding old skin and investing in my own renewal. Where the narrator of “No Cover” sees thirst all around her, reflecting her sexually parched existence in a long-distance relationship, I now see in each thorny ocotillo and mesquite tree a spiritual warrior, tapping deep wellsprings and warding off those who would sap them. I have changed, and much of the narrator’s sense of novelty evident in this piece has worn away, but Tucson remains, for me, an interesting place to write and evolve.
