Essays
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To Become a Fossil
Some people made long pilgrimages to marvel at this superlative specimen. Other people, like the girl growing up in a nearby suburb, got to know SUE through happy proximity. And because her grandma—my grandma—volunteered at the Field Museum. What I’m…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson
The mansion, introduced in the novel’s famous and enchanting first paragraph as, “Hill House, not sane,” is a home with a foreboding facade, an unhappy history, and walls set at angles all ever so slightly wrong.
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Hear the River Laugh
In the blink of an eye he slipped under. The flash of a foot popped through the river’s amber hue downstream from where he’d been. I stood on the side of the bank. Other swimmers reached into the river from…
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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?
