Last year I attended a party with my mother, in honor of her friend Carolyn’s 75th birthday. The party was filled with people from my mother’s past. Most of them had met at Mesa Community College in the 1970s. They’d been part of a pilot program designed for women returning to school after taking hiatuses […]
I am a myth-maker; I make myths of men. My journals and essays and mental spaces are filled with names like Jared, Jeter, and Jefferson, all of them monsters I tried to tame with a pen. My version of myth-making is a form of self-deception. I don’t do this on purpose. It’s a defective coping […]
I opened the door to my parents’ downstairs closet and flicked on the fluorescent lights. The room smelled like old coats and disuse. There I was again, home for the holidays and indulging in some bi-annual sentimental scavenging. My broken beginner’s Fender Stratocaster was leaning against the wall; on the high shelf sat a retired […]
A line was already forming outside the glass doors of Queens County Family Court, on a grey February morning. It was 7:45. Inside, police officers milled about sipping coffee while municipal employees with key card access politely skirted the crowd, buzzing themselves in through a side door. At 8:00 one of the officers unlocked a […]
On April 26, 2017, Hulu will release a TV series based on Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Originally published in 1986, the story finds us in a North America occupied by the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian government where women are a rigidly controlled sexual and reproductive commodity. It’s commonly […]
There was a time in my life when I entertained the idea of saying the following out loud—“I do not identify as white.” I considered saying this because in my cultural studies classes, at my liberal arts college, I had learned that race was a construct and that the concept of race was created by white people […]
Something has been missing. I’ve been looking for it since the election. Amid the noise of national politics I’ve felt an underlying void. There’s something that is bigger than my fear of the current administration or its impact. It’s bigger than Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, and Michael Flynn. In my life, it’s bigger than whatever […]
I think I’ve been to Disneyland twenty times since November 2016. I live in Orange County, about fifteen minutes from the park, and most days I wait till school is out so I can take my daughters with me. But I also go alone. I’m thirty-six. As kids growing up in San Diego, my sisters […]
As a video game producer, my job is to address problems that arise in development. Whether it is to make a boring level fun, or to create a plan to moderate the penises that players inevitably create (using in-game text, player animations, or level editing tools), I work with my team to find solutions. And I’m […]
The day begins with me realizing I am sore. My legs, butt, lower back, even my torso feel like I’ve been in a professional football game. Which is something I know a little bit about; once upon a time, though not for long, I ran with footballs for money. Presently, my soreness is the result […]
I lost my mind again. I lose it frequently, to varying degrees, but it generally returns quickly. Lately, though, my mind has taken longer trips, leaving me alone with my body for weeks at a time. In its place, there is rage. I have stared blankly at the ceiling, contemplating suicide. I have […]
This is a love letter from me to you. Why? Because you deserve one. Because I miss you. Because it was just Valentine’s Day. Because I need to know what it was in you that always demanded an audience, that so craved connection, that sought relief in everything from loud music to medication. I created […]
all names and identifying data have been changed to protect privacy My friend Rebecca and I, both writers, have been invited to lead a creative writing and empowerment group for girls at a local middle school. Our own adolescence is a distant country, but we both remember discovering our writing, our creative process, at that […]
I used to ghostwrite erotica novels. It was lucrative and consistent work doing something I love—telling stories. I could embarrass myself here trying to justify why I had a penchant to write drivel, but my point is to illustrate that ghostwriting erotica was quite literally the only thing I could will myself to do for […]
For two years and five months beginning in 2006, I lived in a 3000-square foot home—a sprawling suburban dream. It was a contemporary Spanish colonial with a red tiled roof and a series of sloping arches that surrounded the white stucco façade. My mother thought our house was the town library the first time she […]
… for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud type, the most important office in a democracy, Citizen. ~President Barack Obama I have an aging mom. She lives in Brooklyn, New York while I live in Los Angeles. We talk almost every […]
We all seemed small in the shadow cast by the Los Angeles Federal Building on Wilshire. The building, which is in an area known as Unincorporated Sawtelle—a parcel of land, surrounded by LA that is not part of LA County—is a white monolithic structure with columns that the eye follows from ground to sky. I […]
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