Personal and reported creative non-fiction exploring lived experience.
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...
A therapist works inside a container. The four office walls form the structure within which we listen, of which we ask. Wehave been trained, licensed, hired, but we are just as flawed. Just as human.Each hour starts very much the same, but the air still contains...
In an unboxing video, a product is meticulously liberated from its packaging for the purpose ofentertaining overly-stimulated children so that under-rested mothers can take a five minuteshower in peace. My kids use hashtags. They speak in emojis, slang, and...
A few weeks ago, my league tennis team competed at the North Carolina State Championship. Twelve of us arrived in Raleigh in a steady stagger, played a dozen doubles matches in suffocating heat, laughed until we cried, then departed in a similarly haphazard manner,...
You don’t want to know what it’s like to house-sit three spoiled-rotten dogs all by yourself. You have to be on guard at all times. Those little critters your wife calls her “fur babies,” and that you love more than you’re willing to admit, are mischievous little...