“Berlin to Houston was written in the dead of the 2020/2021 winter months, in that elongated endlessness of the COVID-19 pandemic before the vaccines were available, during which time Aura [Rosenberg] and John [Miller] were more or less trapped in their Berlin apartment. After she sent the package, Aura checked the tracking every day, and was emailing me with updates (and the lack of progress) so often that I knew she was transferring their lack of mobility, her cabin-fever, and the effort she was taking to keep her and John safe onto the lack of control she had on its delivery. She was obsessing and she was suffering. “It will take as long as it takes,” I told her. It was from that place, to help give her some agency in her powerlessness, that I suggested she write about the international voyage of her girl and bull, to make use of it, to tell their story. I commented that there was something labyrinthine about it all, inspired in no small part by the imagery of the three drawings that she was sending me, but also informed by the years of play that she and I have engaged in, for which Borges and Benjamin have led us, those master architects of tales that loop and collapse.”
—From Adam Marnie’s editor’s note