Personal and reported creative non-fiction exploring lived experience.
I didn’t like that house from the moment I saw it. It was painted an awkward green military color that looked forced onto it. The door was a clashing, fresh blood red. The porch light glared like a police spotlight. At least I didn’t live there. After holding my...
My career as a girl began with my own sex rejecting me. I was the new second grader at Christian Academy in Japan, and a piggish American girl named Chelsea, with chocolate perpetually smeared across her facial regions, singled me out almost immediately. Chelsea had...
As a college student, I formed the habit of buying old books. They were everywhere in Boston in the 1970s. A few years later, the streets of New York teemed with old books, laid on the steps of a brownstone, on a blanket on the sidewalk, or...
Between Exercitium and Speculatio — Harvard's 375th Commencement The word that names the morning is older than the university that uses it. Exercise — as in Commencement Exercises, printed at the top of every Harvard program since the ceremony's founding in 1642 —...
I didn’t know it was called “mercy.” Growing up, my parents worked a lot. They were both educators which meant all of us spent our days in a classroom. Mom had started to move up to administration, so she not only taught during the day but at night as well. She...
I had never heard that word before, but I knew it was racist. Being in the marching band was one of the lowest orders on the high school social hierarchy, and I was at the bottom of that group. There were several reasons for that, but one had to do with uniformity. It...
I peed on my sister’s head, and she saved my life. In 1974 I was a ragamuffin four-year-old with unkempt mousy brown hair who wore the same outfit most days: patched polyester faux-denim bellbottoms and a Strawberry Shortcake blouse. My sister Mardi was two years...
It starts with a snake, gliding through sun burnt grass in the warmth of an August afternoon. Puck lunges, and eighty pounds of dog launch into motion on one end of a leash. Force = Mass x Acceleration = Me jolted out of my daydream on the other end of that leash. My...
Sedona booked the ticket to Santa Barbara on a Tuesday. Denver was cold that morning, the kind of cold that didn’t just sit on the skin but seemed to move through her bones, settling in the places where sadness had already made a home. Outside her apartment window,...
I’ve decided to stop calling my father, “Dad.” At least when I talk to my siblings. “Dad” is suffused with affection and a nod to the role of parenting, a role he abdicated years ago if ever he inhabited it. Instead, I’m calling him “Denis.” That’s his name. I could...