About

Awards and Publications

Each morning I get up and feed the beasties. The dog has her breakfast of sweet potato slices and cottage cheese. She slops the curds over the rim of her bowl rooting for the potato. The black cats are both gone now; time was I fed them kibble and filled their cobalt-blue bowl with fresh water. The crows have crusts of bread or corn. I brew coffee and drink a shot of carrot juice.

I moved my desk upstairs to the southwest corner of the house. From this vantage, I assess the clouds and guess the weather for the day. Rain, I think, wind. I watch the quail family bob and fret on the hill. I notice the brass icon nailed up to the fence post years ago. I turn on the lamp. I uncap my pen.

Maybe problems are never solved, only outgrown as we change time zones. I dreamt of boarding a train and changing my socks. I left the corporate world after 25 years and only now do I begin to hear my own thoughts. I sleep later yet still wake, startled, wondering what projects are stacked in the day, what problems wait like sinister fish in black water. I look at the clock in the dark.

Kim K. McCrea earned her BA in English before embarking on a career in technology and public service. Kim won Oregon Writers Colony 2018 essay award, Treefort’s 2017 Wild West Writing Prize, and was named runner-up in Cutbank 2018 short prose contest. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Cutbank, Tishman Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere; she is the author of the novel “Pandora’s Last Gift.” A native of the Pacific Northwest, Kim lives in Oregon, where she studies the moon and stars and wanders with her Labrador in the rain.