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Tag: nostalgia Finding the Right Form to Tell a Story


On January 24, 2016

In Books, Creative Process

Story does not exist without telling. “The story is in the telling” represents more than a turn of phrase. The story constitutes the What, the content; the telling is the How, the form. The How is the receptacle for the What. The two have to fit perfectly. Only true form gives story life.

This has been on my mind lately as I began writing Bubbles for a Spirit Level [1] mere four years after conception. It took finding the right form to get here. The Land of Lost Time




The Cargo Literary magazine today published my essay, “The Land of Lost Time,” in which I reflect on the greatest accomplishment of Cuba’s Revolution.

Pico Iyer has called Cuba “the island of waiting”: Cubans wait for Fidel Castro to die, for an exit visa to leave the country, for goods to arrive to stores.

The check-in line for the 8:45 a.m. flight from Mexico City to Havana wends around large suitcases, shrink-wrapped luggage bales, and a lectern where a handling agent sells Cuban tourist cards and informs passengers the departure is delayed. She is uncertain until when, but probably around nine o’clock—this evening.


“Operational reasons.” She motions for the next in line. I shuffle forward with nostalgia in tow: growing up in the 1980’s socialist Czechoslovakia I must have heard such non-explanations daily. But only now, a quarter-century on, do I register the absurdity. Cubana de Aviación’s check-in attendant confirms the flight will depart at “twenty-one sero-sero.”

Continue reading at Cargo Literary → The Strange and Twisted Dream of Twin Peaks Nostalgia


On October 21, 2014


This essay originally appeared on my blog American Robotnik. It is part of a series of essays by writers and other artists about the influence of the TV show Twin Peaks on their work. Writer Shya Scanlon is collecting the essays in the Twin Peaks Project.


Nostalgia is the immigrant’s permanent condition. Faced with the uncertainty of the unfamiliar present, not to mention the unknowable future, he turns to what he knows: his own past. Perhaps it was just a natural extension of the nostalgic condition when a couple of years ago I set out to write a memoir of becoming a man in Czechoslovakia during the regime transition from socialist to capitalist and beyond. I flicked through the collection of my memories like through a stack of library cards until one, from my college years, caught my attention. At the time it seemed unrelated to my personal history as it unfolded on the backdrop of massive historic changes. But as I tried to shake it and concentrate on more relevant memories to put down in writing, I realized I could not proceed until I saw Twin Peaks again.