family
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Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone
Does it seem now like I believe in God and he is a comfort to me? I don’t, and he isn’t. And yet this story is a comfort to me.
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Strangling Yourself While Trying To Sing
Over at Maud Newton’s website—a letter, to you, on old family letters. Dusty old leaves from the early 1900s, excavated from here or there. Grandpa’s love triangle. An apology from the sanitarium in which Aunt Louise died. There’s magic in…
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Litany for My Mother’s Body
My mother’s body horrified me. Nine years old, I watched her dress. Her belly was rippled and sagged and scarred—a used-up bag of nothing.
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Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
When my father died my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: “Oh man, I’m an orphan.” There’s also this relief: It’s done; it’s finished; it’s over. Because I had felt…
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Of Farmers and Fathers
For reasons I’ll never understand, I am my father’s rooster. My life is filled with farmers. We find our farmers where our interests are, I guess.
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Dispatch from the Carnival #3: Bloodlust
What does not occur to me at the moment of this bloodlust, will not until much later, is that I am actively seeking the violence. I want to witness the worst.
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Third Drink Decisions
In the years before he showed up in Lubbock, he wandered the streets of downtown Dallas near Fair Park.
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Forgetting Myself
If you loved Jerry Stahl’s essay “Bad Moments in Parenting” as much as we did, be sure to check out the beautiful, devastating account of of one woman’s experience with dementia by Gerda Saunders. Her deeply personal essay gives insight…
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Hearing Mandarin, Speaking English
In middle school, “Yo Mama” jokes infuriated me. My mother was so Chinese she couldn’t eat a hamburger without pinching her nose. She was so Chinese she wore bamboo slippers. In a stunning essay for the Michigan Daily, Carlina Duan writes…
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Invisible from the Inside Out
Everything I have, aside from what I’m wearing, is in a light brown vinyl purse with two outside pockets. I hold the purse close at all times, and I sleep with it under my head like a rigid, desperate pillow.
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Icefalls
It seemed like nature might be offering up something fraught with emotion, a beautiful image that a writer could imbue with heartbreaking symbolism. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It was just fall, and so the leaves were red.
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The Meaning of Family Roles
I choose to believe the label “godmother” means something. I was connected to my godmother by the ceremony, and the birthday cards, and the word itself. She wanted to be that for me. I don’t believe in the holiness of…