Fantastical stories of urban nomads in Berlin, New York City, Toronto and New Orleans…
The dreams in which you and I were together were slowly being replaced by ones in which I watched you and Tullis walk hand in hand along the Berlin canals. I did not know her name in the dreams; I only watched, always on the other side of a busy roadway, and even when I was able to get close, neither of you seemed to see me. Or maybe you did, but it didn’t matter that I was there. The years and cities and transatlantic flights; they all passed.
I inherited money I hadn’t been expecting and bought an ancient little house in Berlin but rented it out, only keeping a tiny attic room for myself. Mainly it was filled with books I d never found the time to read. When I passed through I’d pick them up, wonderingly. Most of them I couldn’t remember ever even having bought. I met Tullis on the subway once. When I think of this, it seems almost impossible. I d seen her face in dreams so often, yet she was no one I d ever met. I d never met you either. It seems very strange for there to be two people in my life I only know from dreams, but so it is.
Praise for Harvesting the Moon:
“Her stories are full of sadness and loss, and yet, I feel as if they are returning to me so many things that life makes us lose. Reaching into the vortex of the past, Ursula comes up with an incredible salvage of heart, humanity, imagery and truth. The real stuff.”
– Candas Jane Dorsey
“Exploring the life of a mask-maker who creates new artistic visions out of people’s discarded junk, and the weird thoughts that come from sharing water, Pflug explores transformative possibilities, revealing that the static world is entirely one of imagination and that everything is constantly changing. “The Water Man” takes place at a time of celebration, a carnival that reminds viewers that the world is in a perpetual state of death and rebirth as winter becomes spring, that new worlds are always forming and that they need that sleepy time of freezing to dream up new visions of the world.”
– Derek Newman-Stille