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The sounds I made were pleasant to my ears, but that’s all they were to me. I was too young to understand what culture and heritage meant, too young to understand the reasons behind memorizing ancient poems.
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To me, my mother’s body has always been the safest place—a place for me to return and to transform.
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I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
...moreJ.D. Vance talks about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the perils of upward mobility, and never forgetting where you come from.
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When I ask her about her childhood, she draws a blank. There is only blackness to her past, her entire early life erased by the trauma of that night.
...moreMy characters often follow their own family recipes. Our reenactment of the simple tasks of beating egg whites or stuffing meat into cabbage leaves blasts open a portal to a new old world. The vivid memories of a lovingly cooked family meal are likely to be lodged deep into one’s sentimental mind. Over at Lit […]
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When I was young, she would tell me we were part Navajo.
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A first day means there was a never-day.
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Countering our culture’s disregard for all things elderly, comics have become a medium of choice for celebrating the lives of our oldest and wisest generation. Bird in a Cage (Conundrum Press, 2016) joins a growing roster of graphic novels about the elderly that explore how much they are loved, how rich and complicated their lives are, and […]
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Understand that she is both the gold city in my imagination and its queen, and that her death signifies the end of that dream.
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[S]ometimes you don’t know you’re experiencing a fairytale until years later.
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J. Ryan Stradal talks about his debut novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest and why the rise of the American foodie has less to do with hipsters than you might think.
...moreAt Vela Magazine, Katie Booth writes on the historical repression of sign language in favor of oralism, and her experience growing up hearing with a deaf grandmother: Everywhere she went, she brought Sign. In my mind, it was an act of rebellion as much as it was an act of preservation. The schools told her that […]
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