"I have come to believe ninety percent of art-making is about courage. The courage to listen to our instincts and the courage to trust them. The courage to believe in the value of ourselves and our work. The courage to devote countless hours (days, weeks, years) to something with an unpredictable outcome."

Maple and oak branches lash the windowpanes, sirens scream all over town.

How could we not pine for all our lives not lived? How can we not love and want it all?

The land grips a person at birth and tugs at them throughout their days like an old, ill-advised love. MacArthur’s subjects are painfully aware of the divide between here and there: adolescents who want nothing more than to leave and never return; grown children forced to come back to settle family business; elderly people realizing, in their final years, just what they have sacrificed to live in such a place. Even those who have managed to move elsewhere are forever trapped by liminal connections to the region of their birth.

Haiku, Half Wild