Essays
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The Rumpus: Redesigned
When Debbie Millman and I decided to buy The Rumpus, one of the first things we wanted to do was redesign the website which was great but due for a refresh. For the past several months, we have worked with…
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On Nature Writing, Growing up an Indoor Kid, and Walmart as Landscape
We see the world through high resolution filters. Brands become our chaperones to exotic landscapes. Never mind the break in aesthetic—the golden arches pop-up along the interstate while driving through Death Valley like the sudden appearance of a roadside oasis.…
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House of Three Rooms
“The body flicks the lights on. A yellowing glow floods the interior, like a head full of nothing. The lights are on, goes the saying, but nobody’s home. My father says this about the dog too dumb to hunt. The…
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On a street named after a forest
my parents didn’t believe me that biking made no sense to my body & they told me I was too afraid & I tried to believe them & I rode where they told me to ride even though I knew…
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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…
