Category: how to win the lottery

we talk to deb olin unferth, author of barn 8, about heist stories, teaching literature, and chickens.

“barn 8 was the first thing to truly go wrong. later everyone would say so. the mistake of barn 8 would endure. barn 8 would go down as the colossal error that ensured the defeat of the greatest animal heist in recorded history.”

“terrible, definitely. but it’s not really an emergency, he thinks, putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. an emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. in an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp.”

“sounds come up and out of nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, oh, my hopeless jesus. he has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. the tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. from underneath, it could be yggdrasil, the world tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the hoel chestnut. two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. the whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the evolutionary tree of life—one great idea splintering into whole new family branches, high up in the run of long time.”

“on sunday we slathered brioche with cultured butter, dolloped crème fraîche on daubes, and spooned a pudding of aida’s creation. the interior was so creamy it recalled the molten center of the earth. if the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens.”

we’re thinking local, reading global.