"The word becomes an alibi." — Roland Barthes I have writer's block. And this is how it feels: it feels like the start of a conversation—that terrific moment when you know you're going really get into something, and you can see the arguments, the

In one of the last conversations we had before he died, my father sat across from me at his small dining room table—among assorted framed pictures (of Native Americans, of Abraham Lincoln, of faraway mountaintops sketched with the plunk and pick of a banjo), curios, carved boxes, feathered dream