Tin House Tease

The New Cliche, Part Two

My Date with Amy Hempel

I Write About You
The things that scare me most are about routines, redundancies, traditions: waking up the same time every morning, the same bus stop and same route. There was a handsome Asian man preparing his coffee next to me, and he smelled sour. Sour doesn’t quite describe it correctly, but it was a marrying of cologne and his breath, which could have benefitted from a mint. What if that smell was all we knew, though? What if that’s what we recognized as a pleasant smell? You couldn’t what-if smelling salts in the same way but you probably could with this kind of smell. If we all believed, were conditioned to believe, that the odor coming off this otherwise clean gentleman

On Being a Man
Part of the enjoyment of being a teacher of English is that you will read books you never would have considered picking up in the bookstore. I had to read a series of books for an American Experience class I’m teaching, and strangely, both dealt with the African-American experience: Kindred, by Octavia Butler and Passing, by Nella Larson. I’ve taught for fifteen years, and not only had I not read either of these books before, but I had never heard of these books before. Forget what it says about how much more I need to read. It m