from “The Next Thirty-Two Years”
Driving at Twilight (Main Street Rag, 2018)
This speculative essay about the author’s father’s work begins far from where readers might expect a speculative essay to begin. Rather than being overly poetic, it begins with the pragmatic, a hallmark of Coughlin’s voice.
The second-person point of view immediately asks us to become Coughlin’s father on