For all this, Anna did possess more cultivated tastes as well; she loved theatre, the arts, and architecture, and the first ballet school in Russia was founded during her reign. She carried on much of Peter the Great’s program of Westernization, for example funding the Russian Academy of Science.

Also among her more humanistic tastes was a great passion for the idea of love. She was excited to make her marriage, at the age of eighteen, to Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Courland, also eighteen years old. Anna’s uncle Peter threw a fabulous wedding celebration for her, its coup de grace occurring the day after Anna’s ceremony, when Peter staged a mock wedding between two dwarves—a parody in miniature of Anna’s happy nuptials. Anna was deeply touched by this, but her own marital euphoria would prove short-lived. Her new husband agreed to Peter’s challenge of a drinking contest, from which the young man contracted an ultimately fatal case of alcohol poisoning. Anna’s marriage thus lasted a mere two months. She went on to rule the province of Courland for the next twenty years, biding her time until she could return to Russia after Peter’s death and assume the throne.

Legend has it that Anna never forgot the charm and poignance of the dwarf wedding as it intersected with her own. (This of course depends on perspective. According to the clickbait-y website, Peter’s dwarf-wedding idea contrived more to mock his fat-faced, unpopular niece than to celebrate her.) During one especially frigid winter of her reign, Anna hit upon the idea to stage her own mock wedding, using two of her courtiers as the groom and bride.

The groom would be Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, a nobleman whom she had been punishing for the crime of apostasy after he had secretly converted to Roman Catholicism to marry a devout Italian woman. His punishment took the form of being forced to serve as one of Anna’s jesters; one of his duties is said to have been to sit on a nest in a public reception room and cluck like a chicken. The bride would be Avdotya Buzhenina, another of Anna’s jesters, known for her wit and storytelling ability, but considered physically ugly, probably because of her dark skin and the fact that she was a member of the Kalmyk people, a branch of the Mongols.

It was the ice palace, though, that would be the centerpiece of Anna’s fantasy come to life. The newly married couple would need a place to honeymoon. In this killingly cold winter, what better way to showcase her own power, and Russia’s, than to build a miniature palace with ice from the Neva River and force the couple to spend their wedding night therein?

Thus begins the real-life story that I adapt in “Suite of Ice,” the first piece in my forthcoming collection.

The Empress Anna

Like everything I write, The Folktale Collector’s Daughter is all about loners. Only one of the six pieces in the book focuses throughout on characters working together, relating to each other, rather than on a character making their way alone. Avdotya is a cog in a tyrannical system, obliged to use her talents to please a ruler instead of getting to stay with her own people and build a life among them. In the near-future quasi-dystopia of “The Wise Girl,” Lloyd has a daughter but is essentially alone in his grief for his wife, lost a year before. In “The Sad Princess of Highland Park,” Francesca struggles with depression in her wealthy father’s mansion, attended only by a few distantly cheerful servants. In “Golden Feathers,” the tales of three loners are braided: myself, as I reminisce about growing up with a Soviet Union-idealizing father and later reading about Russia’s war on Ukraine and considering what it means to have roots in two evil superpowers; my great-uncle Peter, a scientist working at Moscow State University who disappeared during one of Stalin’s purges; and a made-up character, Nadya, a Moscow woman who mounts a solitary struggle to protest the war on Ukraine.

The loneliness of the individual who confronts an evil government is a particular kind of loneliness, one which has always interested me. Thinking about Avdotya now, a loner forced not only into marriage but into a potentially fatal honeymoon, I wonder if the reason for my interest has to do with the perverse appeal of being forced to give up one’s lonely, individual fight for good fortune—give up and let history take over.

To me, being lonely means, among other things, being unimportant, invisible. When you’re caught up in history, though, suddenly you’re important. When the Empress pushed Avdotya into a honeymoon in an ice palace, suddenly Avdotya had what I myself say I want—a companion, and a story.

Of course, it could work the other way around as well—as it did for my great-uncle Peter, caught up in Stalin’s purges and leaving so little trace that his descendants are forced to speculate that he more than likely ended his life in the gulag. The gulag isn’t organized to give you a story. The gulag is organized to erase you from the story altogether—not even leaving you with a story of your death.

But we all want to be important. In today’s United States, you see it on social media—people with “Antifa” or “No Maga” in their Bluesky usernames, seeming positively thrilled at the idea that we are totally living in a fascist dictatorship, dude, and anyone who denies it is a hopeless moron, and if you ever wondered what you would have done if you’d been a citizen of 1930s Germany, well guess what, dawg, you’re doing it now.

The truth is, “the cost of taking part in creating history is always staggeringly high for people,” in the words of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who as one of the founding members of Pussy Riot could never be accused of having stood by, waiting for history to happen to her.

Still, for the lonely and the bewildered, it darkly beckons—the idea that you could be walking along one day, minding your business, when the Black Maria suddenly pulls up alongside. Now, suddenly, you find out that yes indeed, you have mattered.

Somehow, even though the love affair ended, she decided she should still do the part that involved her moving to Manhattan. It sounds like rushing toward heartbreak with open arms. Diving headfirst into loneliness.

The bulk of the book is essays about artists, the visual art of loneliness; she starts with Edward Hopper and his many famous portraits of people by themselves at windows. She writes brilliantly about the glass window of the diner in Nighthawks, “curving sinuously back against itself,” and the way it figures everything she is saying about how loneliness at once isolates and exposes the sufferer. She talks about Hopper getting inspiration for his paintings from riding the “El” by lit-up apartment windows at night.

I too live in the city and can see strangers’ lit windows. There’s one in a neighboring building right across from my balcony, where I can often make out someone sitting at a computer. They never draw their blinds, and—as I’m no Edward Hopper, I suppose—this annoys me. It’s as if I’m offended by their lack of concern about voyeuristic eyes. Their leaving the blinds undrawn means they don’t care if I’m staring at them. Well, they should care.

For my part, I draw my blinds when dusk falls. But I know exactly what Laing means about the intense self-consciousness of being alone all day, of feeling watched by a curious but indifferent gaze. You pad about, talking to yourself, wondering what strangers would say if they could hear. Would they be charmed by your chatter with the cats?

When I lived with a boyfriend for a couple of years decades ago, we used to have long conversations made up of total nonsense: wordplay and inside jokes and whimsical stories about the inner life of our unsuspecting kitty; nicknames for each other that were just “Boy” and “Girl”; frog-like faces that we made at each other; little clucking noises in our throats to express humorous dismay. These were really the deepest things we shared. In that sense, we were like family.

Hopper, Night Windows

Last weekend I was reading a profile of a young writer who has a novel out right now getting a lot of attention. It centers sexual abuse as a main theme and draws on the writer’s own memories of such trauma, which she has written about more directly in nonfictional form as well. At one point the article quoted her wife, who said something about how the writer will sometimes turn the thermostat up to eighty degrees in her study because a hot room makes her feel safe.

That’s it, I thought. That’s what it means to be loved. Someone not only knows about but is deeply interested in your strangest tics. Someone cares about the minutiae of your days—about whether you’ll get groceries in the morning or the evening, and what you’ll have for dinner every night for the rest of the week, and when to leave to try to beat the traffic, and whether and where you should wear those burgundy balloon pants you bought that looked so good on the Anthropologie catalogue cover model but that sound like rippling sheets of tarp when you walk.

That kind of attention could feel suffocating sometimes…like an eighty-degree room. But it would be something you would rely on when needed.

Part of the shame of loneliness, for me, is that it seems that I tried to carry these expectations over to other people—like colleagues—who shouldn’t be expected to be one’s intimates. It was a category error. I mistook certain behaviors—flirting, teasing, more than occasional thoughtful listening—as signs that I was more important to certain people than I could ever really be. I thought they would care about my minutiae.

In a way, I envy Olivia Laing for having been plunged into loneliness by a broken romance. At least for her, it was clear what the problem was. In my case, I was more subtly ghosted—left dangling by these friend-colleagues during the pandemic, not fully aware that I was in hot water until I was all but poached.

After all this time, I’m still not over it. I wonder if I’ll live this way for still more years—maybe the rest of my life? –pining not even for lost love but for the lost illusion of friendship.

Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, the scientist of love, posits that even the perception of social connections has beneficial effects on the individual whether those connections actually do exist or not. When I was forced to lose my perception of having close friends—when they eventually told me point-blank that they didn’t want to talk to me—I fell back on writing as my way of connecting. It’s ironic, but beautiful in a way, that my Folktale Collector’s Daughter book of stories in fact came together in large part because of those very same friends. In happier times, we shared teaching ideas and worked together on the literary magazine published at the college. In the days before I ran into trouble with them, they read many of the stories—one of them in particular read most of them—and told me how they saw it as a book. Their dreaming it gave shape and solidity to my dream: just what you always hope for with writing partners.

One of the last things that happened before the falling-out was that one of them sent me video comments on a fifteen-page story I had sent him. In the video review, he told me that it should be much longer and offered a brilliant reading drawing on the theme of doubt, the way fairy-tale plots use the rule of three, and the push-pull around giving and receiving help that is a feature of Russian folk tales, to add up to a whole structure for a novella.

And shortly after that, he cut me loose. But I still had one string, that plan for the novella, and I ran with it. I spent the next year writing The Folktale Collector’s Daughter, all about the imagined life of the youngest daughter of a folktale collector closely modeled on the great (and tragic) Alexandr Afanasyev, a nineteenth-century scholar who made foundational contributions to the canon of Russian folklore but whose work managed regularly to displease the government, with the result that he died in his mid-forties of tuberculosis that was doubtless aggravated by poverty, leaving a wife and three children.

In my novella, after his death, the family gradually disintegrates, mother and three young-adult children finally going their separate ways. The youngest daughter, Galina, or Galya, ends up falling in love with a girl a little older who is involved in radical politics. They move from Moscow to St. Petersburg together to become foot soldiers in a revolutionary cell.

Without giving too many spoilers, Galya winds up lonely in a crowd. Into this character who’s a third my age and who would have lived a hundred years before me, I infused the emotion of my own disappointed dreams of love and work and toiling together with close friends and colleagues on a passion project, whether that be a literary magazine or a plot to kill the tsar.

I read something else about Edward Hopper this past week—Kurt Andersen’s foreword essay in the Spring 2026 issue of Prairie Schooner, a themed issue on loneliness. It’s an irritating essay in many ways, as Andersen a little too wholeheartedly embraces Hopper’s own vaunted dismissal of the idea that loneliness is a main theme of his work. (Every piece of writing about Hopper seems to use his quote about how “The loneliness thing is overdone.”) Andersen expresses his disdain for the whole idea of loneliness, something he quotes the late art critic Peter Schjeldahl as calling “maudlin.” A feminine-coded word choice, I can’t help but think. Solitude, the concept Andersen favors, is tough, factual, self-contained. Loneliness, with its implication of lack, is needy, whiny, weak.

To this masculinist defensiveness, of course I much prefer Laing’s curious, candid approach. Fifteen or so years ago, I had the idea to try to claim the concept of unrequited love as a feminist ideal (Let women behave just as absurdly as men have been celebrated for behaving for hundreds of years….). That didn’t ultimately work out, but I could still try, with Laing, to claim loneliness as generative. I know it has been for me. It pretty much has to be.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything.

--Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

This quarter, I’m teaching Popular Literature again. We’re reading most of the same books as the first time I taught it, two years ago. The course takes part of its inspiration from an essay by Viet Thanh Nguyen on the political power of crime fiction, particularly BIPOC-authored fiction.

We start with Walter Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress. Ezekiel Rawlins is one of those narrators who’s frank up to a point, friendly but cagey—a Houston transplant and World War II vet living in L.A. in 1948. He’s recently lost his job assembling airplanes and is worried about not being able to pay the mortgage on his cottage. His bartender friend brokers a gig for Easy with the smoothly menacing DeWitt Albright, who says he needs to find a beautiful young white girl who likes to frequent Black nightclubs—places where Albright couldn’t blend in. Easy, despite his misgivings, takes the job out of a combination of financial worries and manly pride. Thus he falls into a risky new career as a private detective.

In his introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition, Mosley says that he sees Easy as “an inheritor of the mantle of the hardboiled private detective genre that started with Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op.” Mosley made his name with this idea: a Black answer to the principled loner who is Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, world-weary but never too jaded to try to uncover the truth in a vicious world.

Marlowe’s loner status is essential to his identity. His loneliness is part of how you know he’s morally pure and how he keeps his purity. He is known to spurn the advances of compromised women. He’s got no family, so he can dedicate himself to the work and take any risk—and of course it makes him less corruptible as well.

Such a romantic image. I haven’t gotten over my love of it. But maybe it’s for white men only? Could a male detective of color bring it off? Or could a woman detective get by, living this lonely? The loneliness of television women-detective characters is usually mitigated by family members in the background: troubled children, exes who still cause problems. The Fall’s Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson, comes the closest to the male hardboiled ideal, but she’s not quite as pure as Marlowe, with her taste for one-night stands.

Easy isn’t morally pure either, letting Coretta James seduce him while her boyfriend Dupree snores in the next room. All around, he’s less lonely than Marlowe. He could never have taken Albright’s job if he were lacking a community. He has the crowd at John’s speakeasy, and he has his lunatic friend Mouse, who comes all the way from Houston to help him—murderous though that help sometimes threatens to become. Easy needs Mouse and the others, despite all their faults. It’s clear, if only from Easy’s dealings with the police, that it would be deadly for a Black private eye to try to work as lonely as Marlowe does.

But having friends also gets you in trouble. In the end, Easy lies to the police to save Mouse but turns in another acquaintance. He doesn’t lie about what this other friend did, but he does only turn the friend in so as to divert the cops’ attention from himself. There’s no doubt Easy would have been in danger—unjustly—if he hadn’t given up this friend. But the moral compromise eats at him.

Loneliness has always seemed to me to have a purity about it. When no one needs you and you don’t need anyone, you never have to compromise. There aren’t competing demands on you. You decide on your own what you’ll do and when you’ll do it.

Such purity is a privilege. You couldn’t maintain it without resources—financial, cultural.

Impromptu vigil in Centralia, Washington, for Renee Good and all those killed by ICE to date, January 11, 2026

But then there are historical moments—like now—when it seems clearly wrong to claim the privilege to stand above the fray, apart from the bonds of family and community, aside from the felt obligation to defend the country in which you happen to live. No one walks alone down these streets that have been turned mean—in Minneapolis, or in Portland, Chicago, L.A. The two people we are all mourning right now—the ones who died publicly, on camera, gunned down by federal thugs—died enmeshed in bonds, physically close to those whom they were trying to protect.

I also feel that they died trying to shine a light on all the previous, less visible deaths caused by our monstrous government and its rogue militia. Deaths that were in fact lonely in the least “privileged” way—deaths far from family; deaths in custody, custody of the supposed “law” that had been turned against them because they were the wrong color or had the wrong pedigree or the wrong papers or who didn’t have papers or who did but it didn’t even matter because they’d already been deemed expellable anyway.

“So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here” says a popular protest sign. It acknowledges the truth that sometimes you’re never lonelier than when you’re in a crowd. I’ve been anonymous in several loud crowds recently. So I can attest, it’s lonely.

It feels hopeless. They are trying to kill us. And they want us to feel hopeless. They want us to feel lonely. And we can feel our feelings. We can feel as lonely as we want to, individually. But the flip side of our American myth of rugged individualism is the American reality of individual stubbornness. Cussedness. All our heroes, white and male or not, have this quality. America is the story of loners who gathered in groups and fought back when some powerful evil entity tried to erase their communities.

Whose streets? Our streets, only as mean as we let them be.

Most of the time, when [Stephen Cole] looked at genomics data, he was used to seeing chaos—meaning the genes weren’t expressing anything specific. But when he tested for loneliness, he said, that signal was much clearer than he’d expected.

That clarity settled on one primary concern: in those who are chronically lonely, Dr. Cole told me, “Just about every high-prevalence killer in contemporary epidemiology gets you faster.”

Reading this gave me a case of the doldrums. This wasn’t the first I’d ever heard of this correlation, but around Christmas, perhaps it hits harder. And how unfair that loneliness, which you don’t want in the first place, will end up killing you prematurely as well!

Of course I started thinking about my mother again, how her arteries failed her during her self-enforced solitude after my father died. I thought of all the excuses I’d made to myself—how I’d told myself I would never push people away the way she had, how I was more of a joiner than she was. How I would make sure to have scheduled activities, and people who expected to see me at them, so that if I died suddenly I’d be missed.

But maybe it didn’t matter. I was still chronically lonely—still, according to all the experts, on a greased path to an early death.

Well, the only reason I’d gotten the book in the first place was to research the topic. Now, unsurprisingly, it was bumming me out, but that was a cue to dig deeper. I went back to the book and noted the name John Cacioppo (1951-2018), presented as the world expert on loneliness. He’s the one, actually, from whom we get the idea that loneliness kills.

Cacioppo’s field is fascinating because it’s all about “getting under the skin”—a recurring metaphor in summaries of his work. It’s all about how feelings affect physiology and vice versa. He co-founded the field of social neuroscience, which is innovative in the way it goes beyond looking at the individual as the basic unit of inquiry, instead focusing on interpersonal relationships and their associated emotions and underlying biological mechanisms. In the course of this work, he made discoveries about social isolation and its effects. He found that loneliness alters perception and disrupts genetic expression—the type of observation referenced in the quote from Cole, above.

Cacioppo also had an amazing personal story. In 2011, he met a fellow neuroscientist, Stephanie Ortigue, at a conference; she was an expert in the effects of love. Like him, she had contributed to new thinking about her field, showing how romantic love, far from its conventional image as being something deranging or distracting, actually shapes the brain in positive ways, improving the individual’s ability to think quickly and to respond to others. The two scientists fell in love and married after a courtship of eight months and joined forces professionally as well, becoming a research team at University of Chicago. A twenty-plus year age gap between them made no difference to their bond; she took his last name when they married and, when he fell ill with salivary-gland cancer, attended all his radiation treatments and shared his hospital bed. His oncologist noted that it was like treating two people in one.

A wall drawing of “Les Amoureux de Peynet,” from lithographs by French illustrator Raymond Peynet—a classic lovebird couple in Stephanie Ortigue’s native France

One thing that none of the articles mention is how disempowering this could sound—a much younger woman marries a giant in his field and then collapses her identity into his—but how it seems it wasn’t that way at all. The scholar of loneliness and the scholar of love married, and their work, so complementary, combined to become something greater. The only bad part is that the marriage was so short; after coming successfully through his cancer treatments, John Cacioppo died suddenly in his sleep, three years later.

Seen in a certain light, though, the brevity could add to the sense of magic about the story. The story of the Cacioppos sparkles in mind, so unlikely and so almost perfect, like a star sapphire.

Their work goes against convention in such a heartening way. Therapy can’t cure loneliness, they explain, because it’s too much a one-way street. To overcome loneliness, we need “mutual aid and protection”—to be able to help as well as to be helped. If you’re just taking help, and no one is depending on you for help, you’re still going to be lonely. True dat.

Another interesting observation is that it’s not whether you actually have social connections as whether you perceive that you do. The perception alone is enough to provide the good neurological effects. What a comforting thought, for someone who spends a lot of time in their head and who values even the idea of friendships with certain people.

And then there was what Stephanie Cacioppo pointed out in a recent interview: “Love doesn’t have to be with a living person. If you are really in love with life, with your passion, with your hobby, it can also be a buffer against loneliness.”

Will I die young (or middle-aged) from lack of company? I don’t know. It’s truly a daunting idea, the idea that one’ll more than likely be alone forever. It’s not an idea one can, or even should, really commit to.

Or is it? Maybe if one does commit to the idea—even provisionally—an alternative model presents itself. The model is to be a sort of staunch daydreamer, and dream-believer. Someone who looks for ways to help.

We live in a society that trades in messages, often for profit, about how we should fear and shun the state of being alone, even while that same society is rarely organized to make it easy to find community. But if you’re obliged to be alone, you almost necessarily start to flirt with the possibility that you needn’t knuckle under to the fear. You start to poke at the idea that even the lonely can devote themselves to love.

Well, fourteen years after Stranger, I finally have the chance to come out with another book. I was recently notified that my story collection The Folktale Collector’s Daughter won a contest sponsored by a press called Broken Tribe.

With a new book titled The Folktale Collector’s Daughter, am I emerging from isolation into the world of viable relationships, of family as a source of the stories that sustain us?

It’s pretty to think so!

Of course, isolation remains an important motif in the collection. Families are in every story in the book, but they’re all either unconventional or broken in some way. The final piece is a hybrid story-essay called “Golden Feathers,” which braids three narratives, one of which tries to imagine the last known months of my great-uncle Peter’s life.

There was a true loner, Uncle Peter (or Piotr, as I spell it in the book). I say that because all I ever heard about him from my family—from my father, who shares his name—is that he was a biochemist at Moscow State University, and a lifelong bachelor, and that his name appeared on the rolls of the Moscow State faculty until 1937, after which it abruptly disappeared.

Many—maybe most? –Russians today have a similar story in their family history. When I was in Russia in the Peace Corps in the late ‘90s, I found that all I had to do, when talking with locals about the Russian side of my family, was to mention 1937, and my listener would nod immediately. I didn’t need to say more. Nineteen-thirty-seven was the peak year of the Yezhovshchina, the period of Stalin’s cascading purges of intellectuals and other “undesirables.”

My great-uncle Peter as a young man, holding his baby brother, my grandfather Andre

Sometimes, people to whom I tell the story will express sympathy, as if I lost a relative close to me. It’s kind of them. I don’t know if I ought to feel guilty about the truth—which is that I find it sort of cool to have this story in my family background. Selfishly, I like the cachet. It confers some glamour that I didn’t have to lift a finger to acquire.

Maybe less selfishly, it gives my attraction to political activism some cred. In fact, it turns out that our family tree numbers resisters of tyranny as well as its victims. Uncle Peter’s father, my great-grandfather, was a surgeon and researcher who made pioneering contributions to the field of thoracic surgery. But in addition, while he was a student in St. Petersburg in the 1870s, he was a member of a revolutionary society working to raise the political consciousness of workers and soldiers. For this, he was arrested and sent into internal exile for a time. Coincidentally, the title piece of my collection is a novella about young revolutionaries and assassination-plotters in St. Petersburg in the early 1880s. When I was writing it, I didn’t even know yet that my own ancestor had been running close to those circles.

But Uncle Peter himself is a more shadowy figure. If my own father knew any more than those broad outlines he shared with the family, I can no longer ask him. And the only other thing I remember my father saying is that another of my great-uncles—one of his mother’s brothers—made a trip to Russia at some point shortly before Uncle Peter went missing and that my father thought that the two men might have met. An image is in my mind of two fellows standing on an apartment-building landing in Moscow, speaking together in English, loudly enough for any neighbor to hear. This was my father’s speculation—something that could have happened, which if it did, would have been more than enough basis for a neighbor to report Uncle Peter to the secret police.

My Russian great-uncle—so lonely that he was willing to risk being sent to the gulag just to have the chance to talk to an interesting foreigner. Or…so oblivious. I never of course told my father this, but the first thing I thought of when he told me this story was how typical of our family it sounded to throw caution to the wind like that. To blurt out something awkward in the name of being friendly. Or to act like the rules didn’t apply to you. Or to conveniently forget the rules, just long enough to wrest some unexpected pleasure out of a routine day.

Being lonely might go together with that kind of obliviousness—the sort of sweet cluelessness that comes from existing a little outside the normal run of social and domestic life. When no one’s looking after you, you get a little wonky. And the wonkier you get, the more likely you are to stay lonely.

And so, as I wrote in “Golden Feathers”: He left nobody to go looking for him. There was no one dedicated to his well-being, no one who felt they couldn’t live without knowing what had happened to him.

Of course, I don’t know if that’s true or not. As I wrote in the next line, too, it doesn’t matter anyway. Having a loving family and many friends wouldn’t save a person from being put to death in that era nor from being lost in the gulag system.

To think of him as lonely, though— eccentric, undefended, unaccountable to anyone, maybe muttering to himself as he puttered around his apartment or his lab, maybe humming to himself behind clenched teeth the way my father used to—is…not comforting, exactly. But there’s a logic to it. It’s fitting. It makes me feel there’s a reason for things I do, for the way I live.

Why else do we tell family stories? Why else do we tell stories at all?

Finally, spring sun.

At cottage, quick visit.

Inside, still cold.

Haiku and solitude have long been closely knit. The most famous haiku master, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) lived the life of an admired poet and teacher in Edo, Japan, but suffered from loneliness and low spirits. Only after he left home in 1684 on the first of several long road treks did he attain better happiness. Thereafter, he alternated between periods of living at home, teaching in the hut his disciples had built for him, and periods of wandering.

On the road, it seems, he could get out of his own head—meet a wider range of people and closely observe his changing environment. In 1686, he wrote his most famous haiku:

An old pond

a frog jumps in—

the sound of water

The tension between communion and solitude shaped the rest of his life. During his final summer, he went out walking again and contracted a stomach illness. He is said to have died peacefully, surrounded by disciples. His last haiku goes:

falling sick on a journey

my dream goes wandering

on a withered field

The classic haiku includes an image of nature and a twist of epiphany at the end. “Nature,” of course, can mean something one sees through one’s window. But I always thought I should get outdoors more. About two years into this period of intense solitariness that started for me during the first summer of the Covid pandemic, I decided to buy a small house in the country. Buying the particular property was an impulsive decision—one I regret in some ways, because it’s led to legal headaches. As I’ve told at least one friend, if I’d had a partner, I would never have bought the cottage; when two people have to make a decision, it will usually be more carefully thought through.

But, too, if I’d had a partner, maybe I wouldn’t have needed the cottage. With a partner or a family, there would have been other methods of “getting away.” There would have been relatives to visit, trips with the kids…I think? I don’t know how regular people live.

Two haiku written at the cottage:

Gray spring evening.

Shrouded minutes stop, will stay

at eight forever.

A bird cries, pocking

the stillness. Curious, two-

toned. Gets no reply.

Front room at cottage

Haiku don’t have to follow the classic rules, of course. Paul Nelson is another poet who makes haiku a central part of his practice. His American Sentences, a tribute to Allen Ginsberg’s updating of the form, consists of seventeen-syllable sentences written every day about whatever was on his mind:

10.12.18 Not ‘til I see my shadow do I get I’m having a bad hair day.

4.20.01 After deficient feeding, cat sits behind bowl—feline mendicant.

Others of his do follow the classical expectations more closely:

9.21.03 A south gust jars loose a sunlit strand of spider web and summer is gone.

I like writing haiku because they come so quickly. I’m not a poet and so put no pressure on myself for them to be good. It’s whatever comes first to mind. Sometimes this past summer, it was current events that disturbed me— all over again—for how people could suffer to no purpose or point:

From July 2025:

In a distant, sun-

browned land, bombs kill ones in line

for food. So calm here.

Mid-September 2025:

Latest news horror

distracts. Would try for fresh air,

but the sky is smoke.

But usually, they were more inward-turning (so, here, dateless, timeless):




Rain is back. Dead phone

this morning. Life’s fine—inner,

outer moods aligned.

Patches of sun, shade

chase each other on concrete.

Last day of summer.

This solitude, one

steady, lifelong fact. The blinds

rattle in night wind.

Anyone who’s on their own, whether by chance or design, could do worse than to take up the practice of daily haiku. It’s pure meditation, an exercise of being in the moment. It’s not a form that lends itself to exhaustive analysis of reasons or root causes.

Perhaps if I really did set myself the discipline to write one every day, in the right spirit, not expecting anything, first thought best thought, just put your head down and do the work, in the appealing formula of mindfulness advocates….

It seems so simple. So possible.

10.25.25 Rainy fall Saturday—the year sniffles softly after one last blaze.

Haiku comic by David Lasky, found in his Manifesto Items, #15

As it turned out, we lived there for thirty months, long enough for me to read through almost the whole English-language section in Oslo’s downtown public library. The flavor of Western Europe settled in my imagination for life. Even today, when I read any novel set in a city, I still always picture street corners and public squares in Oslo. And in London, too, the narrow streets wind in a pattern more floral than grid-like, the grimy alleyways echo with mysterious possibility, and the convenience stores smell like apples and chocolate.

Like a lot of bookish American kids, some of my most memorable early reading comes from England. At ten or eleven, I devoured the novel Young Bess about Elizabeth I’s early years. I still see so vividly the opening scene: twelve-year-old Bess bantering with her step-uncle Tom Seymour on board the royal flagship, the sun glinting brilliantly off the waves and the wind freeing a piece of the princess’s red hair from her jeweled cap and whipping it about. Even today, I catch myself thinking of a sunny October day, the bright blue broken only by a flock of gulls flying in V formation, as “Elizabethan weather.”

And rebels are always alluring—whether they’re historical princesses or one’s own kooky dad. Rebels are usually lonely, of course—but loners with a cause.

Like thousands of other tourists, my Tudor fannishness brought me to the Tower of London. The weather was overcast rather than magical blue, but the first glimpse of the massive structure was still impressive—walls within walls covering twelve acres, the outer battlements punctuated with the cross-shaped “loop holes” that tell you definitively that you’re not in America anymore, and not in the twenty-first century.

I had visited Westminster Abbey the day before. Already, after not yet forty-eight hours in country, I felt oppressed by the weight of institutions. The sights to which tourists flock are nothing so much as signs of the mighty, indifferent power of the imperial state. Churches, towers, parliamentary halls…all there to tell you that your individual voice and being is of no consequence, will be stifled under layers of stone.

And then of course, there’s the trauma-porn aspect of attractions like the Tower. There’s a reason why the Imprisonment exhibition boasts the longest line. People go to the Tower to thrill to stories of the murder of the boy-princes and the execution of Anne Boleyn, smug in their centuries of removal from those government-sponsored horrors. Today, living under the threat of fascism, maybe a touch less smug, but that only adds to the fascination. Our current president, after all, would like to be a king. Quite likely if he could, tower torture and revenge executions are what he’d like to bring back….

But on the other hand, as you make your way through the ruins and informative plaques of London and York, you also find everywhere signs telling you how much the state cares. Posters in stores and transport offices warn that verbal abuse of staff members will not be tolerated. Posters in the subway caution you against the dangers of heat exhaustion and encourage you to carry a water bottle. Posters near drinking establishments remind you to keep your voice down when exiting the pub, out of concern for the neighbors.

I couldn’t help but laugh to myself, imagining somebody like Tucker Carlson sputtering about the “nanny state.” But maybe today, some states really do care about their citizens as individuals. Fascinatingly, Britain even has a Minister for Loneliness, in recognition of the toll that widespread loneliness takes on public health.

Still, I wonder why hearing about that makes me feel even lonelier--?

All told, of course I’d rather live in today’s world, when the state’s protestations of care for the people are backed up by funded initiatives, and by elected leaders. But it’s undeniable that those tough times of five hundred years ago made for tough people. At the site of Anne Boleyn’s execution, one can see a plaque inscribed with a message of tribute to all prisoners who were put to death in the Tower, thanking them for their courage.

And there were even lonelier ways of dying at the Tower. I learned about Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel (1557-1595), a courtier who fell afoul of Queen Elizabeth for his involvement in Catholic plots. He was consigned to the Tower and spent fully ten years there. He was never told that Elizabeth had never signed his death warrant, so he woke up every day not knowing if today was the day he’d die by the axe. His only companion was his dog, who also ran messages from him to other prisoners—a heartening detail. He prayed and meditated for hours every day and was known for his patience and kindness to all. When he eventually fell ill with dysentery, he beseeched the Queen for leave to see his wife and son again. The Queen said that would be fine as long as he agreed to attend a Protestant service. She’d even throw in the restoration of his honors and estates. The Earl declined: “Tell Her Majesty if my religion be the cause for which I suffer, sorry I am that I have but one life to lose.”

William and Henry Barraud’s engraving of Philip Howard with his dog in the Tower

As part of the Imprisonment exhibition, one can see graffiti carved into the wall of the room where Howard was kept. Many different prisoners made their mark there. Howard’s contribution, still legible today, reads: Quanto plus afflictiones pro Christo in hoc saeculo, tanto plus gloriae cum Christo in futuro (“The more affliction we endure for Christ in this world, the more glory we shall obtain with Christ in the next”).

Another true rebel, dedicated and consistent. Although his story is tragic, it’s enviable in a way because here was someone so clear on what he stood for.

As for me, I’m a loner still looking for a cause. Maybe it takes shape if you just stay patient. Maybe after some more years, it gradually comes into view.

“Despite living in the most technologically connected moment in history,” write Isabelle Hau and Rebecca Winthrop in Brookings magazine, “rates of social isolation in the United States…are at record highs. Only 13% of U.S. adults now have 10 or more close friends—down from 33% in 1990. The number of those with zero close friends quadrupled from 3% to 12% by 2021. This is despite 40% of Americans longing for greater closeness with friends. The U.S. surgeon general has declared loneliness a public health epidemic—comparing its health risks to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”

This article is about the phenomenon of AI chatbots replacing human connection. Yet after reading it, I’m mostly haunted by these figures. Throughout most of 2021, I was able to tell myself that I had close friends. But now I’m one of the lucky 12 percent with none. And the idea of “ten or more” close friends simply boggles the mind, not to mention cows the spirit. As for the fifteen cigarettes a day: better keep climbing those stairs to my fifth-floor apartment every day, to offset the health risk….

One of my longer stops to understand the phenomenon of loneliness has been Kristen Radtke’s graphic documentary, Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness. Her first chapter ends with a reflection on what it means to encounter strangers alone, in public. “The more I’ve watched companionless strangers, the more I’ve come to think that these moments are only lonely for those who are observing them,” she writes. “Perhaps we see loneliness in others simply to feel less lonely ourselves.”

Curious to explore what that meant, I set myself the task of observing anyone I saw in public who was uncompanioned. Conspicuously uncompanioned, I decided, to narrow it down. Here is the list I came up with:

1) Man (white), maybe 40, at the Iggy Pop concert at Marymoor Park, like me sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs in the “special section” as we waited for the show to begin. He quietly got his “courtesy” dinner plate and drinks, just like I did. He was sitting in the row across from mine. He was wearing a newsie’s cap at one point. Another notable detail was his two-tone shoes: a yellow/purple fade over otherwise standard men’s brogues.

I don’t know why he would have been by himself, really. A stylish singleton stands out, since the standard expectation is that a loner is nondescript. He gave me cover, made me feel cooler about being alone.

2) On a brief bike ride to the Fremont Cut, I passed behind a man sitting alone. He was skinny, shirtless, pale, hunched over, with shoulder-length blond hair vaguely reminiscent of Kurt Cobain. Young. He gave off a vagrant vibe—the kind you “expect” to see by himself.

3) I ended up taking my own seat on one of the benches, as it happened near another loner. But this was a “safer” type of lone guy: again a white man in his 30s or early 40s. He had a shaggy brown poodle with him, lying so still and droopy on the bench that I had to double-check it was a live dog. The dog didn’t seem unhappy, though. The man himself wore a cap and gray knit shirt and had a slight pot belly. Just sitting by the water. There might have been a bag next to him. He wasn’t gazing at a phone. He seemed content to watch the canal.

4) On another evening jaunt, I saw the silhouette of a loner, by dusk. On closer view, he was a youngish Black man with long dreads. He was sitting on one of the wooden slabs at the yacht-docking spot on the Westlake Marina walking path. He might not have counted as a loner since he was possibly talking with someone on a phone he was holding in his lap. But I decided to count him because he was acting the part— eccentric. Rocking a little from side to side.

5) Right near him was a wiry middle-aged white man with light-colored hair, in red polo shirt, standing inside the fence near the yacht docked closest, smoking a joint. I smelled that choking, cloying smell before I saw him. He was standing in classic cool-loner posture, leaning against the fence with feet crossed, meditatively puffing.

6) And how could I almost forget? This summer’s corner madman, as I’ve taken to calling him. He’s been holed up under the Galer Climb overpass all summer. Black, middle-aged, large-bodied. Always shirtless, a hoodie or blanket draped over his shoulders. Overstuffed plastic bags around him. Sometimes lying down, sometimes sitting up. Once, I saw him walking on the sidewalk across the street. He lets out a loud laugh at intervals—so stylized and ritualized that I thought at first it might be a recording. He’s a male Bertha Mason without even the benefit of an attic roof over his head.

(No one ever seems to give him a second glance. Maybe I do—but I don’t do anything more. I’ll sometimes imagine an interplanetary visitor to Earth, reporting back. “They just let people live in the streets! They let them starve!”)

They are all men, my loners. Does it mean anything? Perhaps I missed any lone fellow women I saw, perhaps because they would, characteristically, be less conspicuous. Or maybe the “male loneliness epidemic” we keep hearing about is real across a range of demographics.

So many articles about the sad state of men today. The New York Times seems to be single-handedly trying to revive what we used to quaintly call “the battle between the sexes,” what with this week’s big Sunday magazine piece about fed-up women and anxious men; and the smug letters to the editor informing women that the bleakness of the dating scene serves them right after all of their #MeToo kvetching; and the article about “mankeeping,” which means the situation when the woman in a straight couple does all the work to keep the man socially and emotionally engaged—a phenomenon currently being studied by scholars.

Meanwhile, all I’m after is the same thing I always was. I meet someone doing something I love, who loves it too. We become friends. If they’re a man, maybe we fall in love.

But that really is too simple.

Well, when it’s all too much, turn back to Iggy Pop: It’s just that social life, it’s got you on the run. That goddamn social life—it’s torture, dressed as fun.

Sing it, brother!

And he will. This man (white), 78, scrawny, perennially shirtless, still prancing, still voguing, still singing for his supper in his gravelly growl. Strange and beautiful that he’s alive.

In spite of everything, strange and beautiful as well to wake up, still alone, into the suspended pod of another cool gray lakeside morning.

The madman is still there as well, having lived to laugh another day.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-happens-when-ai-chatbots-replace-real-human-connection/

Iggy Pop, “Social Life” from American Caesar, Virgin Records, 1993

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My mother, Suellen Stanley Diaconoff, has been dead now for five years, and from time to time I still find myself wishing I could tell her about someone I’ve met or something I’ve seen or done. This is not exactly because we were close. In fact, we often went months without speaking. My mother had always been intimidating, but during what would turn out to be the last few years of her life, I began to avoid her in earnest for the sake of my peace of mind. Her judgments had only grown harsher with age.

Still, she’s my mother. I have to reckon with her. And I always wanted to know her better.

I used to pounce on any tidbit. My mother was raised in Oregon, and when I first went there as an adult, to stay at a writers’ colony, I was gratified to see that it looked just like I had always thought it should: evergreen-lined horizons and lots of rain (my visit took place in December), and many pale, pensive young men in peacoats and black beanies. My mother was interested to hear my impressions of Oregon. “Rainy,” I said, and she said yes, that when you didn’t know any other kind of climate, you just accepted it; it didn’t even bother you.

Another time, some years before, I had ended up dating one of those tall, pale, peacoat-clad young Oregonian men, when he and I were in the same Peace Corps cohort in Russia. He had turned out to be rather aloof and unkind, in the way of self-involved boys from most anywhere in the world. (Nothing regionally specific about that.) But in the edited version of the relationship that I shared with my mother, I emphasized the fact that he was from Oregon, like her. It managed to pique her interest. “People from there are practical sorts,” she said, in response to some comment of his that I’d quoted.

I loved hearing her make that kind of generalization. She was a professor of literature and language; she normally favored precision, nuance. So I liked hearing her come out with a sweeping truism about the place she was from—just like anyone else might do. She was capable of dumb love of a place. I think it was at moments like that, that I felt closest to her.

I would have liked to tell her about my trip to Diablo Dam on the Fourth of July this year. I signed up to take an hour-long cruise, co-sponsored by the city electric utility and an environmental learning center, on a mountain lake edged by the dams that power Seattle. I think my mother would have enjoyed the stories of J.D. Ross, superintendent of lighting for the City of Seattle throughout the 1910s and ‘20s and ‘30s--an uber-American success story, wild visionary in a suit and tie, self-taught engineer and creator of a terraced amusement park in the woods by the Skagit River, with monkeys and colored lights and piped-in music, all to advertise the wonders of the dam.

Another local legend was Lucinda Davis, a homesteader in the North Cascades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was a woman who in her late thirties divorced her husband and came with her three children from Colorado to this remote part of Washington state to start a new life, which she lived for the next forty years. She loved the wilderness and was a formidable hiker as well as a superlatively competent farmer, builder, and innkeeper. She and her daughter-in-law were the first white women to summit Pyramid Peak and Sourdough Mountain. She fought Seattle City Light in court when they wanted to build dams near her property, ultimately losing and taking up residence with her youngest son and his family in town, dying just two years later.

I think my mother would have loved Lucinda’s story. My mother had always been fascinated by stories of pioneers. She was the one who turned me on to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. As the years went on, she would often shake her head at some current event or personality in American pop culture and say she wondered what the pioneers would have made of their descendants, these lazy and whiny and self-involved people. “They would have been just embarrassed,” she would say, at the sight of what Americans had become.

Tromping through the remains of J.D. Ross’s woodsy pleasure garden, I felt some of that old childhood excitement at the idea of a homesteader life. The smell of sun on bark is timeless. When the wind rustles through the treetops in the early evening, you feel you’re at the tip of the eternal, gorgeous world. Of course, Lucinda probably did not wax so romantic. But maybe she did allow herself a moment of satisfaction, sitting on the porch at the end of the day, surveying the farm she’d been able to clear and build out of the wilderness in just two years, or the inn she rebuilt after it burned down.

So seductive, the stories of people like Ross and Davis, larger-than-life doers who made America great. American cranks. And loners. Of course, they had helpers, and families. But they also had singular visions and convinced the people around them to do things that were impractical to say the least. Learning about their stories seemed an appropriate way to spend Independence Day. Why not take refuge in American legend to escape the depredations of current American reality, in which our so-called president reached his self-set July Fourth deadline to sign a cruel and stupid bill.

Which brings me back to my mother—the idolizer of rugged American loners, the professor of literature, the one who lived in her head, who treated life like a novel, who preached “fierce independence” but who outlived her husband of fifty-five years by only three months. The one who politely instructed her neighbors to leave her alone, that she had her grief under control, and then closed herself inside her house in a desert cul-de-sac to binge-watch the first Trump impeachment hearings. The one who declined to call the doctor even after she got too short of breath to walk to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The one who died one evening over dinner in front of the TV when her heart suddenly stopped, and whose body wasn’t found for twelve days.

Of course, it’s probably too simple to call it the death of a loner. Yet it’s hard not to when one considers how a person used to calling on friends, or to asking for help at all, would have phoned someone when she realized that that her next breath wouldn’t always reliably come.

I live a life that my mother might have found ideal: all by myself in an apartment, companioned by two cats. No partner to complicate my life. No friends I see regularly. When I heard about the way she died, I told myself that when I was old, I would make sure to have scheduled volunteer activities, some way to guarantee that people would miss me if I didn’t show up. But that’s very deliberate. Very planned. That’s what a loner does: keeps a detailed calendar, tries to plan for eventualities.

That’s what I always expect to do. I’m writing this diary to try to understand what a life built that way means.