The place where I write

A March 2012 blog post in Orion. 

"By one of those happy accidents of personal history, I live these days in an abandoned granite quarry in southern Brazil. Some of the immigrants who settled this part of South America came from stone-quarrying regions of Italy, and soon after laying eyes on the mountain we live on—a charismatic granite dome that looks like El Capitan—they got down to the business of cutting it into cobblestones. For most of the twentieth century the mountain was riddled with claims, and the stonecutters and their fires and their goats stripped the forest down to scrap...."

Read the whole post here.