Assignments

Hiatus is over; subscriptions resuming; hello again!

Writing to you from my abuela-in-law’s house where I’ve been working on my Spanish by listening to her explain how she, at 89, is truly a lot younger than Biden, and that no one remembers that life under the Franco dictatorship was actually pretty nice.¹ Most of what she says goes over my head, but immersion is everything, right?

I’ve also been working on a big writing assignment² which has reminded me how I once imagined that being a professional writer would involve a lot more assignments than, at least for me, it has.

When I was twenty and more or less directionless, Hurricane Katrina took the roof off my first apartment and after a few months away from the city, I returned and found New Orleans to be a kind of assignment in itself. Though I’d always kept journals, I started writing more intensely that year simply because my surroundings were so bewildering and interesting and I wanted to understand what had happened and what remained. The essays I wrote then, and my mentor Martin Po…