My job is as a roaster and green buyer for a coffee company. I roast the coffee but I also source the green (unroasted) coffee beans (technically green coffee is a seed and not a legume), and so it’s my job to taste samples and figure out what roast profiles work best for each specific […]
My parents were not joiners. Mom was a healthcare worker. Singing on the church choir and attending occasional PTA meetings was the extent of her activism. My dad, employed as a transit worker, occupied his free time trying to out run his despair. Though both of my parents were members of labor unions (Local 1199 […]
He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory… ~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient I owe a debt of gratitude to middle school Latin. I could already pronounce and spell many words in the language of medical terminology when I started […]
“Isn’t it her right to write her experience in the way she experienced it?” My friend and I were having a heated discussion about the New York Times best-selling novel, All the Bright Places, and I’d said that I thought the portrayal of one of the main characters reinforced negative stereotypes about people with mental […]
French National Day commemorates the July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille by a mob of enraged Parisians looking for ammunition in the fortress-prison that symbolized the tyrannical Bourbon monarchy. The Bastille’s fall marks the beginning of the French Revolution. On Bastille Day this year, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a nineteen-ton white Renault truck […]
When I was sixteen I read a Christian men’s book called Wild At Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul. The book was about how to unleash the inner William Wallace (from the film Braveheart), and live a life of adventure and danger (within, of course, the bounds of traditional gender roles and conservative, evangelical Christianity). […]
Home is that accumulation of memory and sensation, not always sweet but invariably familiar. The familiarity is a gift which never ceases to orient me to my place in the world. As a memoirist, I draw on the abundance of this gift to excavate building blocks of story buried deep in my subconscious. My long […]
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars. / Where did it all go wrong? ~John Berryman, “Dream Song 4” Next year I will turn forty. Thirty-nine feels dire some days, at the edge of oblivion. I walked away from my career last year to start grad school and focus on writing, and now […]
This is a letter of gratitude. Gratitude for having had the opportunity to serve as Blog Editor here at Lunch Ticket for two issues. Gratitude for my peers in the writing community. Gratitude for being given the privilege of editing and writing among such a talented gaggle of writers (an inkwell of writers? a creed […]
When I arrive at the DMV at eight in the morning, the line is already out the door. A woman wanders person-to-person managing the queue with a clipboard of forms and checklists. She asks me what I am here for and when I say “Name change,” she congratulates me. “Thank you, I’m glad it’s over […]
Recently, my son Quentin called to report that he’d summited Mt. Rubidoux and would be home soon for dinner. I chuckled. Mt. Rubidoux is, more accurately, a hill that rises 500 feet above the Santa Ana River in Western Riverside. Under most circumstances, “summit” would be excessive, though that was not the case […]
(What the white man say?) A piece of mine’s That’s what the white man wanted when I rhyme “Untitled 3,” Kendrick Lamar In my small mountain hometown of Bailey, Colorado—filled with rednecks, conservative Christians, new age hippies, construction workers, adventure enthusiasts, and commuters to Denver, most of whom, like me, were white—I grew up knowing […]
When I graduated from University of California, Irvine in 1980, with a BFA in theatre, I didn’t stick around for the commencement speech. The day of my last class was the same day I boarded a plane and flew back to New York. I hadn’t been in Southern California by choice. Six years had gone […]
Dear Lunch Ticket readers, The literary community has circulated a letter criticizing The Antioch Review’s recent publication of a piece by Daniel Harris, titled “The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate.” If you haven’t read the piece, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you do. However, many of us have. Appalled at its ill-informed and insensitive […]
There are only two interesting structures in Tustin, California, the city where I now live. They’re a pair of identical military blimp hangars, built in 1942 from Oregon Douglas fir. The city is tearing them down. These are among the biggest wooden structures on the planet; indeed, they contain the largest covered, unobstructed open space […]
My grandparents, Henry Bullock and Lucille Ford Bullock, were farmers and owned their land. They grew corn and tobacco. As a child I helped remove eggs from the chicken coop and heeded the warning to stay away from Henry’s old mule. Lucille canned peaches, pickled cucumbers, made applesauce, jellies, and strawberries stewed in sugar. She […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
“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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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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