By David Armstrong

Featured Art: Rep2 by Felicity Gunn

Here in the backyard of our mutual friend in San Diego, holding a beer while a balmy twilight coats us in aquatic hues, a woman talks about Norway. Norway by way of Bulgaria.

“Bulgaria is awful,” she says. “But Norway is expensive.” She’s a systems analyst for a cyber-security company.

Another woman says San Francisco by way of Hong Kong by way of, originally, Thailand.

Among others in this six-week writers workshop are a couple of New Yorkers, two Baltimoreans, L.A. folks (with stints in Poland), a South African, and an energetic woman from Lake Charles, Louisiana, whose pale hands utter like scared doves when she revs up for a joke.

Chatter. Writers talking shop, life, travel.

I say Ohio. “I’m from Ohio.”

Someone says, “Oh.”

Like the abbreviation of the state itself.

Oh.

A sip of beer, eyes downcast, searching the dirt for a lost thread of conversation.

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