Sharlotte walked into the A.A. meeting just as the Arizona sunset was throwing peach and orange colors on the walls of the cheap commercial space. A loose, dingy white T-shirt barely concealed the inner tube of weight she’d gained from a cocktail of psychotropics. Her thin, unwashed hair looked like an animal pelt pasted onto […]
November Bats circle amid the yellow withered plane trees that hover above the old church cupola. The sad singing of the flying cranes grieves the meadow. Autumn toasts white winter. The storm on the other side has no pity, even for itself, and the fire will melt the wind’s rabid song. Twilight masters the soul—it’s […]
The car goes around a bend. The windows are up, the air cool, and we are hemmed in from every angle by the afternoon sun. In the back seat, my mother clasps my palm, as though to assure herself that I am really here. We ease onto IBB Way. On either side, the town lies […]
Last summer, my brother and I met a first cousin for the very first time at a café called L’Improbable in the Marais in Paris. She shared the feminine form of my brother’s name: Frédérique. She was a journalist and arts lover, about to turn fifty. We had been playing e-mail tag for a few […]
Lift Up here even a slim wind sets the outstretched jib singing, but that doesn’t bother me any more than the crane’s height or cab’s close quarters. The way my son tells it, you’d think I lift a hundred tons on my back every day and build those buildings with my bare hands. I say […]
I thought a lot about my daughter Reiley during a recent hike with my sons to the Bridge to Nowhere. Constructed in 1936, the 120-foot arch bridge over the San Gabriel River was part of the East Fork Road meant to connect the San Gabriel Valley to Wrightwood. It was washed out by a […]
I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about—maybe you are too. – from The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction by Dean Young (p. 153) It’s difficult to digest all of The Art of Recklessness into an annotation, probably by design. Writer Dean Young often loses the reader with lines […]
When I was nineteen, I began working on my first book. My goal was to have it published before I turned twenty-one; I would be one of the youngest published writers in history. After my undergrad English classes at the Metro campus of CU Denver ended for the day, I’d spend an hour or two in the […]
In one year, my father died in a crash due to complications of diabetes; I had two surgeries reserved for women 20 years my senior; and I became the guardian for my 92-year-old Grandmother Emma, in the end stages of dementia. My mother, and each of her eight siblings, had diabetes and high blood pressure by age 50, bunions by 55, some form of cancer by 60. […]
“The shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge economy has lasted two decades. Now the next shift is coming: from knowledge to creativity. We no longer need to hire knowledge. It’s nearly all at our digital fingertips.” – Kaihan Krippendorf, Fast Company * * * I didn’t set out to wear a […]
LA-based writer Wendy C. Ortiz writes about her loss of innocence in her debut memoir Excavation, which has received rave reviews since its 2014 release. Ortiz’s writing is rife with figurative language like simile, metaphor, personification, parallel structure, alliteration, and repetition, but it is also incredibly self-reflective. Whether it’s the temporal distance that gives her […]
On March first, the American astronaut Scott Kelly returned from a year aboard the International Space Station. In the pictures he took from space, sunset cast a rosy blush over the Earth’s broad face. The aurora borealis skittered, green over the planet’s arc, and the Milky Way was a great starry sheet, torn up the middle. […]
On September 26, 2009, at about a quarter past one in the morning, while outside, a cloudy night sky was closing in on Padua, he, lying on his king-sized futon next to his profoundly asleep wife, was shaken by a violent cough. Eyes staring into the dark bedroom, he was overcome by the age-old fear […]
Writing creative nonfiction presents a challenge: the task of bringing clarity to unearthed memory—snapshots of long forgotten folk, environs, longings, often triggered suddenly, unexpectedly rushing to the surface. These snapshots call the writer to fill in dark spaces, the faded shadows in imperfect memory. In February, Maurice White, the founder of the seventies jazz-soul-fusion band Earth, […]
The Ecstatic is Victor Lavalle’s intriguing debut novel cataloguing two months in the life of Anthony James, a 23-year-old horror-movie loving, obese, unstable, socially inept, obsessed with cleaning, sometimes-schizophrenic, college dropout. Anthony’s narrative begins on September 25, 1995, when he is abruptly rescued from “living wild in his apartment” (3) in Central New York and hauled […]
“Life’s wounds are incurable and you write them and rewrite them in the hope of being able, sooner or later, to construct a narrative that will account for them once and for all,” explains Elena Ferrante, the Italian author of My Brilliant Friend and the other Neapolitan novels, in one of her rare interviews. After […]
I learned that truth may not depend on facts in a classroom at the St. Irenaeus Parish School. As a high school junior, I was among the church’s youngest Catechumens, or unbaptized probationers preparing for the Sacraments of Initiation into the Catholic Church: Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. Although my siblings and I attended mass regularly […]
Rebecca Solnit gets the title for her work The Faraway Nearby from Georgia O’Keefe. “From the faraway nearby” was how O’Keefe would sign letters to the people she loved after moving from New York City to rural New Mexico. Says Solnit, “It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together” (108). It is […]
Last Wednesday, a whitish-grey mixture of clouds and smog covered the Salt Lake Valley, obfuscating the downtown skyscrapers and the mountains in the distance. Visibility was limited to a few stoplights. Welcome to Beijing. Inversion is the technical term for what was happening outside. In meteorology, an inversion is a deviation from the normal […]
I started firewalking after seeing a picture of a monk burn himself to death, but of course it’s more complicated than that. The monk came to history class where we were studying Vietnam, talking about what a mistake it had been, and about the protests against the war, in our country, and over there, where they […]
“We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man’s yesterday […]
Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World is a historical fiction novel set between the 1750s and 1810s, encompassing the time frame of the Haitian revolution. Carpentier creates an alternative history to the popular narrative of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The story is narrated by Ti Noël, an uneducated slave of the French plantation owner, M. Lenormand […]
On November 18, 1966, I got my first library card. I had just turned six. We lived on New York’s Lower East Side and our branch was Seward Park. Built in 1909, the red and grey four-story brick building stood near the intersection of East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal. Unless it was raining or […]
Designed to be murdered by your dog or cat, pet toys appear as dead bodies in these crime scene photographs. Morbidity & Mortality responds to the current popular fascination with cinematic murder and forensics. Contemporary films and CSI-style television programs reveal an obsession with corpses—specifically, artfully composed images of the deceased […]
I had lots of crushes on boys growing up. I might even have loved some. But Señora served me my first real heartbreak. She was my Spanish teacher when I was a senior in high school. She was in her mid-forties, with short blonde hair and smooth, tan skin. She spoke softly, and her bearing […]
In the bestselling medical ethics-centered nonfiction work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot uses primary resources, including one thousand-plus hours of personal interviews, to piece together a life—Henrietta Lacks’s—lost too soon to cervical cancer yet forever immortalized, thanks to the science of cell culture. Like a wedding cake, the book is rich […]
I’m a Boomer. Born in the mid-fifties, I’m a child of the sixties who came of age in the seventies. I share a cultural heritage with every member of my generation, a cultural heritage defined, in large part, by the television programing we watched. Before cable balkanized our choices, ABC, CBS, and NBC reigned supreme, […]
o there is Michelangelo up the ladder
on the platform
laid on his back
wishing he chipped at a piece of sculpture instead…
Recently I wrote an essay about the summer of my fourteenth year, which I spent discovering the Grateful Dead and testing boundaries, musical and otherwise. Somewhere in those pages, I tried to capture the freedom, madness, and jealousies of adolescence, but the story morphed into something else, an elegy to the unbridled narrative of my […]
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