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October 18, 2018
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Asturias Days

American writer Clellan Coe, who has lived on the windswept northern coast of Spain for many years, sees her surroundings as both an insider and an outsider.

Previous posts

Trastero

by Clellan Coe | Friday, October 12, 2018

Ojalá

by Clellan Coe | Friday, October 05, 2018

Pickings

by Clellan Coe | Friday, September 28, 2018

MAS

by Clellan Coe | Friday, September 21, 2018

El Cabo de Año

by Clellan Coe | Friday, September 14, 2018

The Other Path

by Clellan Coe | Friday, September 07, 2018

Broken Boulders

by Clellan Coe | Friday, August 31, 2018

Un Lugar de la Mancha

by Clellan Coe | Friday, August 24, 2018

Cien Vueltas

by Clellan Coe | Friday, August 17, 2018

You Were on My Mind

by Clellan Coe | Friday, August 10, 2018
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THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

A Bird in Hand

by Erik Anderson

Basements can hold mysterious treasures: long-lost letters, old photo albums, forgotten mementos. For writer Erik Anderson, the basement of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania museum sparked a different mystery altogether. What was the body of a 19th century black-tailed trainbearer, a bird native to South America, doing among the exhibits? As Anderson searches through library archives to find an answer, his detective work turns into a meditation on the delicate balance between protecting nature and destroying it. “Why attempt to preserve something as fleeting as a bird’s life? Is this curiosity, or are we holding on too tight?” he writes in a 2016 essay for the Scholar. The more he searches, the more he comes to understand the impulse to preserve beauty where we find it. After all, “Humans may be all brain, but birds are all heart.”