The March 1, 2025 edition of the arts journal Masque & Spectacle, now live, includes my short creative nonfiction piece, written as Basil Rosa, titled Starting From Normal.
The journal is based in New York City (NYU, I believe) and I'd like to thank Drama/Nonfiction editor Lori M. Myers for her support.
Here is a link to Starting From Normal, in Masque And Spectacle Journal: https://masqueandspectaclejournal.wordpress.com/2024/03/01/starting-from-normal-basil-rosa/
The essay takes place in Vienna. Its opening paragraphs are below.
STARTING FROM NORMAL
by
Basil Rosa
It’s about 7 a.m. as I step outside of our hotel room on Theresianumgasse, sunrise over Vienna a weak smear spilling luminous ashes behind a screen of low dense clouds. It’s one of those windless settled-in skies colored with a furry blue that suggests snow. Just looking at it, I feel a heaviness in my legs.
I don’t mind. For the past year I’d been working alone for the US State Department visiting smaller cities in Russia, many of them in Siberia or east of it, that few Westerners have seen or know about. I’m dressed in layers and find it warm for early March.
Church bells start to toll. At other times, I might not have noticed such pleasing intonations, but each gonging I hear stirs what I deem a welcome return of familiar and lost landscapes within. Thinking of them as essential spiritual bodies that need to be aroused from time to time, I must stop, hands at my side, just to listen and observe my white breath and feel glad to be alive....
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