Literacy Narrative

There are so many ways to tell a story about desperation, and I have considered them all. I keep coming back to the same dark room in an eighth-floor Chicago…

Markham and I were in the hot tub the other day talking about spirituality, nature and art, how these things are what people in the twenty-first century want more than…

There was nothing to do but climb. The turquoise sky was immeasurable above the yuyuga tree, slim branches swaying and bending with heavy fruit. At ten years old, waking life…

Although you have never been to Iceland and have no immediate plans to visit, you’ve recently decided that it is in your best interest to learn to speak Icelandic. The…

My grandmother, my mother, myself—we are a daisy chain of readers, a coil of translators, a broken chain of writers. My grandmother, Margherita, would pounce on the romances published serially…

On Cicadas, Silence, and Japanese Poetry   Home   My childhood memories of summer are also accompanied by the drone of a cicada, my Southern Maryland home shared with roughly…

 I had no alternative; I was trapped by language. – Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land   In early 2009, carrying nine school semesters of French instruction, I landed in…

In Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude—one of the great memory-epics, along with Proust’s—there is a section describing the process of recollection that speaks to me with particular relevance right now.…

Jean Rhys, 1975 by Bill Brandt   When I was younger and more carefree, I really admired the flâneurs of Paris. Baudelaire, Baldwin, Sontag, Rilke. What I loved about these…

Neon red lettering reflects hard against my face, spelling out “LIQUOR” on the walls. My boyfriend, a computer scientist, is in the bathroom. His co-worker, John, who I’ve just met,…

One of the worst things is when people tell you that you look okay. People you hoped would know “I’m fine” means I’m scared, and “I’m OK” warrants a hug.…

1. Out of everything I have written, it’s my diaries where I have written the longest and with the most faithfulness.  As a diarist, I’m an observer, a scribe of…

I remember being in a large white, paneled, cafeteria. There were about twenty vertical lunch tables for recipients to sit firmly while they waited for their names to be called.…

The year I moved to Chicago I was cast in a play that rehearsed at the School of the Art Institute. Each day when I arrived, I would pause at…