Sunday, noon. Last day of the 2026 San Diego International Comic Con. I sit poolside at a table for four beneath a blue patio umbrella. The sky is overcast and a strong westerly breeze strums my hair, lays ripples across the near empty swimming pool.
Those hotel guests who came for the comic con and who are leaving this afternoon or evening have checked out of their rooms, stashed their luggage behind the front desk counter, and taken the hotel-to-convention shuttle to enjoy a few last hours of popular culture immersion. I have opted to stay behind and to enjoy the ever emptying hotel.
I miss my cats at home. And the birds at the feeder. In short, I am homesick.
Yet, I know fully the folly of living in the future, of trying to exist in a space other than the one currently occupy.
And really, the present is quite pleasant.
I sit by the pool with a book and my laptop while someone upstairs cleans the room I rented for the week. Within feet of my table, a cafe where I can grab lunch and a matcha latte and a restaurant where I can order a glass of wine poolside. Nothing hard about living in such a moment, yet feelings of homesickness persist.
So, to distract myself a bit, without repressing or avoiding these emotions, I reread the book I finished last night. Not just to pass the time, as I have several books to choose from for that purpose, but because it’s really frickin’ good.
It begins:
The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservations hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind. Father Damien’s best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all he’d had to break his fast was a cup of hot water. He was old, very old, but alert until he had to eat. Dressed in his antique cassock, he sat in his favorite chair, contemplating the graveyard that spread just past the ragged yard behind his retirement house and up a low hill. His thoughts seemed to penetrate sheer air, the mass of tree branches waving above the stones, clouds, sky, even time itself, and they surged from his brain, tense, quickly, one on the next until he’d eaten his tiny meal of toast and coffee
Thus the prologue of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich draws the reader into the interior landscape and life story of one Damien Modeste, formerly Agnes Dewitt.
I finished the novel last night and turned directly back to the first pages to begin reading it again.
This epic, multi perspective novel interspersed with epistolaries written by the protagonist, Father Damien, and addressed to the Pope (many in succession) that eventually result in the assignment of Father Jude Miller to the remote Ojibwe reservation near the U.S.-Canada border where Father Damien is a missionary priest. Miller’s job is to investigate the report of miracles attributed to a Sister Leopolda, a deceased member of the convent community at the reservation.
It is a deeply engrossing read.
Besides rendering verisimilitude, Erdrich’s prose is, of course, rich in imagery and her expert use of syntax expertly reiterates important details without redundancy.
It should be no surprise, I guess, given she has written something like 15 books including novels, children’s stories, and poetry.
I can’t imagine.
So I read–as a writer–and reread again.
I would love to write like Erdrich. But also I’d like to write like Daphne Du Maurier, and Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell, and Elizabeth Strout, and Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.
But, it’s a good thing I don’t.
Because there already is a Louise Erdrich and a Daphne Du Maurier and a Joyce Carol Oates and a Karen Russell and an Elizabeth Strout, and a Gertrude Stein and a Virginia Woolf.
So, I guess, I’ll write like me.
The Zingara Project 