I began to write after Pipo, my father, passed away. I was a month shy of eight years old. I had learned to read and write only a couple of years before. At first I’d scribble notes on loose pieces of paper like He’s on a business trip, he’ll be back, or He’s still around, […]
As an artist and ecologically-minded humanist, I am interested in performing history and historiography through visual means, giving careful consideration to the materials I use. I am currently working on Talk Story, a multifaceted long-term project, spanning four continents and five centuries of territorial expansion and human movement […]
Alexa. A-L-E-X-A. Three syllables, five letters, soft vowel sounds. Depending upon which baby-name website you look at, it is either the 51st most common name for newborn girls this year or the 111th. It’s popular. And why shouldn’t it be? Alexa has a nice ring to it. At least, I thought so—until she moved into […]
[fiction] An overcast day in early November: wolf-gray sky, scraps of cloud pasted above the ragged skyline of the city. Here, half-reclined on a worn green corduroy couch, furred belly bare beneath a struggling hem and a thick braid of drool making a moat of his shirt collar, is Sam, freshly awakened in the living […]
I equate dogs with death. My father brought the family dog home from his firehouse in the South Bronx. The dog was lonely, tired, and hungry, abandoned in one of the worst neighborhoods in the universe, one rampant with crime, drugs, homelessness, and endless flames. I wish I knew how the dog befriended my father […]
Education for Bastards Listen—you could be anyone. Other kids say they know their fathers, but marriage? That’s a knot made for plot twists. What’s better than Imagination? And her pedigree’s as full of holes as yours. She stretches across the unknown, she makes new stories, she flies through the galaxies and back. Her best friend […]
The plan was to go back to Montecito—where, a few days after the Thomas Fire had reached containment, waist-deep mudslides triggered by heavy rain decimated the community. The fire had burned through approximately 281,893 acres, across the Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, destroyed 1,063 structures, and forced over 104,607 residents to evacuate their homes and […]
[creative nonfiction] Her father dies three times. The first time, in ‘69, she’s six, and her mother tells her, “They lost him; he’s missing.” But she knows they’ll find him, and he’ll find her, even after her mother packs a folded-over mattress and her three daughters in the back seat of her white VW bug […]
Growing up no one ever talked to me about the essential knowledge a young girl needs to know. There were no conversations about boys, what I wanted to do with my life or how I wanted to live my life. No one talked about marriage being an essential part having a family, job choices, menstruation, […]
[poetry] I June 25, 2013 i’m in Mom’s office helping her pack for her new home the last home where she’s going home to die I want you to have this she says handing me a yellow post-it it’s a quote that she wrote “In the end it’s not the years in your life that […]
I used to think of death as one of my closest friends when I was young. Not that many people in my life had died.. Now death was just my imaginary playmate. Mental illness ran in my family like a creek. The waters were dirty and filled with parasites, but you could sit by the […]
This collection of short stories never shies away from the human potential for life-destroying darkness. Stories such as “Between,” “The Torturer’s Wife,” “Invasion: Evening: Two,” “Woman Impossible Task,” “He Who Would have Become ‘Joshua’ 1791,” and “Out There” confront the evils of war, political torture, slavery, and violence perpetrated against the gay community. Glave insists […]
There is a certain luxury enjoyed by us memoirists. We get to live the rough first draft of an experience and we get to right it by writing it into polished narratives of growth. Pain can be transformed into a source of inspiration. Any mistake can be chalked up to a learning experience and newfound […]
Into The Fifth speaks to the force of a paradigm shift, as I experience the world transitioning from one dimension to the next. During the creative process, I experimented with sculpture, photography, homemade activated charcoal paint, ceramics, 24k gold, and collage, allowing my creative process to flow through me, without or without thought. In each painting […]
Did I create the monster lovingly known as my son? Or is this a case of nature vs. nurture? Should I smash my iPhone into the side of the building? Or just turn it off? These are some of the questions swirling in my mind as I sit under towering California redwoods, in a Zen-like […]
Welcome to our new Amuse-Bouche occasional series, Litdish. This is a solicited series of interviews with writers and artists in conversation with our staff about literature, art, social justice, and community activism. Please enjoy. ~The Editors Gayle Brandeis is a poet, writer, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of […]
Blue-green watery globe tugging to a red core we are a distant comet, white cloud of unburnished rocks, frisking the heavens for an arc to earth, sea, home. Green-brown Palestine, cactus fruit and wild thyme, olive orchards, cypress trees… we travel on your mountain tops tethered by voices from suitcases and the yaw of blackened […]
[translated fiction] It’s my weekend with my daughter. Vilhelmína is standing between us wearing a Batman T-shirt and a wool jacket, a red tulle skirt and new rubber boots. She’s also wearing a backpack that’s much too big for her scrawny back with a decorative little umbrella hanging off it, and I feel a tug […]
My family and I arrived in San Francisco in 1969, a couple of years after the Summer of Love, seven years after the San Francisco Giants’ last World Series appearance. A trail of incense and marijuana still wafted through the City. I was about to turn twelve, and it is that scent that I most […]
Money flows in the North Shore of Long Island. It flows through the shops along the Miracle Mile. Hermes, Gucci, Prada, Dior. You can see money here, in the tight, trim bodies of Soul Cyclers, in the faces surgically sculpted to stave off time. You can hear it too—in the bright cha-ching of the crisp, […]
[poetry] Husband Ghazal He who cuts the head from the chicken gets the heaping plate; he breaks a wing with a quick snap, slurps marrow, gravy dripping. He falls asleep without swinging. We sing. I am wrist-bound to static eternity—like Daphne, but a plastic houseplant. Don’t put your hair up he says as he slinks […]
The first seminar of my recent MFA Residency at Antioch University Los Angeles—a creative nonfiction exploration called “Stating Your Case”—dazzled and baffled me. I raised my hand to confess I am a newbie; a blind baby bird with its soft-bone beak clapping open and shut. “How do you know what to write about?” I asked. […]
If the title of his childhood memoir needs clarification, before launching into his story of what it was like to grow up at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Trevor Noah includes conditions of the Immorality Act, 1927: The act of “illicit carnal intercourse” between a [white] European with a [black] native “shall be […]
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