An essay-film in progress, filmed in Peru in June 2015 with the support of a Mednick Fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges.  The slide show below includes images from the blog casteeninperu.tumblr.com.

This project includes an essay, poems, and photographs from travel in eastern China in 2011 and 2012.

“The poems I began writing then sprung from the certainty, or at least the hypothesis, that the old city endures in its natives’ memories and imaginations, and from my own wish to write them into that sense of things. Their experience of the old place endures. When they’re here in the present, they’re also here in the past, because each individual is one person with his or her own sensual memories that inflect every new thing that person encounters. “Between thought and expression,” as Lou Reed says, “lies a lifetime.” And this essay—this busman’s holiday, a writer taking time away from the teaching of writing to write—this essay is meant to acknowledge that imaginary city, and to define it in terms of the present, the concrete and haze and photorealistic confrontation of the real.”