Lisa Mecham writes a little bit of everything and her work has appeared in Roxane Gay's anthology Not That Bad, Catapult and The Shallow Ends, among other publications. A Midwesterner at heart, Lisa lives in Los Angeles where she’s finishing a book about mental illness in the suburbs.
"You've got a problem, Mom. I mean, it's a good problem, but it's a problem," said my daughter when she walked into my office the other day and saw the stacks of books I brought back from AWP.
I once read a quote that to consider adultery in literature is to consider literature itself. These past few weeks, the complexities of romantic relationships kept popping up...
You know it’s a small world when you devour a book and you Google the author because you want to profess your undying love for her words and you notice…
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook rested on my parent’s bookshelf alongside The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique and The Edible Woman. As a girl, I liked to peek at the…
I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who…
In David’s Inferno: My Journey Through the Dark Woods of Depression, David Blistein retraces the diagnosis of his complicated depressive disorder and deftly captures the elusive nature of the illness:…
I recently discovered a fascinating cookbook: Rufus Estes’ Good Things To Eat. Written in 1911, this cookbook is the first ever written by an African-American chef. Born a slave, Estes…
Growing up, I learned to play the piano from a hunchbacked nun at a local, catholic university. After my lesson was over, after she scowled at my clumsy fingers and…