Essays
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Something New
Forcing myself, muscling through the mental pain. This is what I remember most of my own recovery. After the brief psychiatric hospitalization at eighteen, I returned for my second freshman semester hell-bent on erasing my failures, erasing the girl I’d…
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10 Wrong Ways to Tell It
Eventually you learn that people love to pity a victim, but more so, they love to judge a victim who practices their right to redress: CHARTER BUS FIRM IS SCAPEGOAT IN GIRLS’ SOCCER TEAM DEATHS. Shame, guilt, and confusion linger…
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Picking Up Bones
“During all the years I’d lived in Las Vegas as a child, I’d felt like an animal trying to escape the harsh environs. In addition to the physical harshness, the desert represented, for me, the city’s cultural barrenness, the lack…
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On “Poppy State”: Myriam Gurba, Bruja of the Conquest
In her new memoir-in-essays, Gurba also reveals herself to be a verbal sorceress. While her previous collections traffic in rage and biting humor, Poppy State, though colored by both, expands into the more healing, elemental territory of native California plants.…
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Mississippi Dog
The dog appears again the next day, under clouds. This time when I notice her she is already sitting out there in the field, facing the broad side of E Wing that must appear to her like one long, stretched…
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How an Earthquake Put Me on a Boat
Today is the day I am supposed to be cured. “Three months,” the fifth doctor I met says. “You will be fine in three months; it just takes longer for some people.” I cling to that number, an arbitrary timeframe…
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After Jimmy’s Heart: Nicolas Boggs’ “Baldwin: A Love Story”
Boggs implicitly asks: is Jimmy still lovable within the fullness of his humanity?
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The Spurious Glamor of Certain Voids
Don’t we all love looking, Diane Seuss wondered, at dead things?
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Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign and the Radical Idea that Muslims are Human
It is against this background of a country that has reduced Muslims into a dark, foreign, terrorist “other,” that Mamdani ran a campaign that centers the affordability of the city for all who live within it.
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Human Error Is the Point: On Teaching College During the Rise of AI
My syllabus is a mess of half-remembered intentions. I re-use icebreakers that I know don’t work. I forget to grade the first assignment until Week Four. I write emails that begin with “So sorry for the delay!” and I mean…
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Transubstantiations
I study artworks made for the cells and dining spaces in nunneries, paintings whose colors have lost their pigment, faded with age and decay, the gold leaf flecked with brown stains. A problem distracts, however: I haven’t stopped bleeding in…
