Writer’s Note: In this poem, I imagine my future dying process, hopefully “years from now,” surrounded by quiet, love, nature, and music. The scene is borrowed from a real place, Commonweal Retreat Center in Bolinas, California, where many have found solace and healing. The poem has since been included in my chapbook “A Doctor Only Pretends: Poems about illness, death, and in-between” and reviewed by poet Matthew Lippman in Tikkun Magazine...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Fried Chicken, 1981” is a portrait of my mother when I was a child. I wanted to say her name the way her mother said her name. I wanted to capture the way she spoke and her mannerisms. I wanted to acknowledge her youthfulness in the context of aging. I wanted to point to the everyday experience of expressing love and care by making dinner. And of course, I wanted to write down how she made fried chicken.....[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: I spend a great deal of my writing wondering about and exploring masculinity; here, I wanted to look at the idea that “men don’t cry” and really twist that around to ask questions about the value of emoting. As a queer writer, I’m also always trying to examine what it’s like to feel islanded outside of the world of heteronormativity, and when those two things came together, this story emerged...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: Pulling Salt from Water was not an easy thing to write. I have never written about sexual abuse. I think this subject braids nicely with my youth and experience of schizophrenia. It’s a story that triumphs over tragedy. It’s a story that highlights my writing life and my need to be transparent. Yes, I have trauma in my past and yes, I have schizophrenia. Those two things no longer define me. I am at peace.
Editor’s Note: “Pulling Salt from Water” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in nonfiction, as published in the Delmarva Review, Volume 14 (2021). From the opening lines, we are invited into the mind of a courageous writer who is “best understood on the page.” She gives her voice to metaphors that “long to be set free, the paragraph that belongs to me, the one I decide to share as I try to touch my reader.”
Author’s Note: The Elements of Drawing is a famous instructional text by the 19th c. English art critic and philosopher John Ruskin. It’s a book I recently picked up when I considered trying my hand at drawing, again. Ruskin made a political project out of training the eye and hand to represent the truth of the world, and it inspired my attempt to apply his lessons to the troubles of our present age....[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Garden” began with the woeful state of my yard which I knew needed tending. The thought occurred to me that while my yard was in a poor state to my mind, it was becoming a paradise to the various residents who inhabited it. I tried to capture a heightened description of an idealized garden that had been left untended. I wanted to contemplate that both value judgments and drama are a matter of perspective. ...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: I turned eighty recently, in a world that seems increasingly crazy and disjointed. For me now, making some sense of that world is less a matter of big ideas than of small actions. Like carpenters who nail together a home for the senile, or the homeless man for whom bus routes map the...[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: My experience in the ballet world, and the close friendships and sisterhood cultivated among us dancers, provided inspiration for this story: “Coffee From Arabia” follows a young up-and-coming ballerina as she navigates growing up, identity, and desire both on and off the stage. In writing, it has been enchanting to peek behind the curtain at this life again! [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: My family lived on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, when I was born, and remained there for two years before beginning a series of moves that would take us to Maryland, California, Michigan, and New York. Between Michigan and New York before our mother left us with our father. My memories before that rupture became hard to hang on to, and impossible to corroborate... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “First Light” is based on a true story from my own history and my mother’s history. There are moments in our lives when we have glimpses into our parents’ formative experiences and what they might have struggled through as children. The speaker in the poem spends her own night thinking about her mother “as that little girl,” and there is a sense she can relate to her mother’s childhood loss, her worry. The poem opens with dawn and closes with a new sense of dawn, one that strengthens the connection between mother and daughter and touches on a faith that things can “be made right again.”... [Continue Story]
