"Whereas some people think perhaps there is some division
between comic and the poetic, actually I think
there are no writers who I admire–with maybe a few exceptions–
that don't have some sense of humor. [...]
I can’t think of a serious writer who doesn’t have a sense of humor."

–SAM LIPSYTE

When my grandfather died of diabetes, I was just glad I got to leave camp early. I’d tired of swimming in the brown water of the lake. There were no bathrooms at the camp and the latrine smelled of urine. I had to pee into a hole in the dirt with flies flying all around me. After the funeral which I wasn’t allowed to attend because I was too young to understand death, we took an airplane to Florida so my father could clean out his father’s condo which was being put up for sale. We brought back my grandfather’s car, an old, orange Pontiac, on the Autotrain but the Autotrain only went as far as Washington D.C. From there, we drove to New York. We were supposed to see the White House before we departed but we didn’t. Instead, my brother and I spent the trip fighting in the back seat. My father had threatened to keep on driving if we didn’t stop but we didn’t believe him until we rode past the monuments.

Robert Kaplan earned his MFA in fiction at Columbia University’s School of the Arts (2015). He is currently at work on his first novel, The Mother. He also holds a BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Michigan. His interests include but are not limited to literature, science fiction, crime novels, the Ancient Greeks, evolution, causation, non-zero sum games and entanglement theory. He is a Brooklyn expatriate living in New Jersey with his three children.