Ellen Darion lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has edited and contributed to textbooks, journals, and magazines; taught writing; hosted paella parties, and driven a small truck. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, Extracts, Sixfold, Special Report: Fiction, and McCall’s. Defunct is her office across the street from the Park Plaza hotel, where sharpshooters lined the roof when politicians were guests, the rotting maple tree that threatened to fall on her house for the past nine years, and her childhood refusal to eat peanut butter, olives, or cheese.