Mark D. Dunn

One day a framed photograph of a bespectacled guy with a big goofy grin appeared in the little guitar shop where I loitered after school. The man in the photo held a guitar, recently purchased at that very shop, and the shop owner—a patient guy with floppy hair and an 1980s squirrel-tail moustache—posed beside him,…

Like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Neil Young has become “unstuck in time.” In his long-awaited memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, Young is transported, seemingly at random, through significant moments of his life. The recollections, although tangential, are rooted in the moment by Young’s concerns at the time of writing: his toy…

He might have given too much had the crow at dawn not reminded that saving a little for the next day is how it’s always been done. He held back. Held back when seed casings withered to let the real stuff out. The sun clamped the sprout heads, forceps drawing matter into bright vacuum. He held back when letters came from the…