The snapshot above may not look like much, but this is the home my maternal grandmother, the only yiayia I ever knew, grew up in before immigrating to Canada, then the United States, when she was in her twenties. I got to visit the house in Paleopanagia in the plains below the Taygetus Mountains, my first trip to Greece, let alone Europe. My father, brother, niece, and I strolled through the orange groves on the property, ate at a delicious taverna in the village, and met my yiayia’s cousin who had quit speaking English some years ago but nevertheless took us on a tour of the inside. I like to think of myself as a writer, but I’m still having trouble describing the trip, seeing the sites of Ancient Greece, witnessing my father’s cousins show us my paternal grandparents’ village Geraki, about an hour west of Paleopanagia. I had no expectations for the trip, but meeting distant relatives in their landscape normalized in countless ways the culture I grew up in and contextualized all the stories that hung like a backdrop just beyond my ordinary, suburban Ohio upbringing.

Anyway, this mix came together much more easily than some recent ones. It’s got a nice mix of old and new, with recent finds like the bookends English Teacher and Rocket. There are rather sweet new Cassandra Jenkins and Phosphorescent songs on there, and I totally forgot about the Jennifer Warnes hit from 1976.

In writing news, I submitted my dystopian road-trip novel manuscript to Two Dollar Radio after carefully cutting 12,000 words in Mexico City. There’s an overwhelming chance my two months of pleasure inhabiting and clarifying that world will be met by a curt rejection email in twelve months. It’s a dream press, but my writing is probably too funny and dumb for it. When I review the credentials and achievements of the authors on their list, all I can do is laugh at my aspirations. But who knows, right? It’s a really special manuscript for me, the best thing I’ve ever written, and I love it like a child.