Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [178]
When she opened the fieldhouse door, she was greeted by the same amber lamplight she remembered from Chelsea, back when she watched the appalling pigeons on the ledge and countless people passing by on the sidewalks below. And to think she and Marcos lived in this old fieldhouse now, which they’d expanded some, modernized some, but which still had Kip’s fingerprints, quite literally, on its adobe walls. Just as Kip continued to live inside Ariel and Miranda and, soon enough, baby Chase, they lived inside the consequence of his labor of love down here in the lower pasture. The delicate balance was struck.
Marcos kissed her. She took off her barn coat, apologizing for staying out late. The river was so beautiful tonight, she said. The starlight on the water. The clouds rising out of the earth. After dinner, the day nearing done, she asked if she could read them something she’d written, before Miranda was put to bed. Marcos answered yes, and the girl settled down in her father’s lap to listen, though she was still too young to understand. And when Ariel opened Kip’s old ledger and read, “Doña Francisca de Peña never believed in ghosts, and even after she became one herself she couldn’t help but have her doubts,” she glanced up, and Marcos said, “Keep going.” So she did.
A Biography of Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow’s maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.
Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.
In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal Conjunctions. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America’s leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”
After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow