At a time when young boys all over suburban America were being diagnosed with ADHD, I was busy having existential crises. I was eight years old: I’d be playing with…
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1. I return to the water like the hand of a clock returns to the same number, a dusty substance. “Of the 85,146 miles of stream and rivers that…
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My grandmother who, according to everyone in the family didn’t understand nor speak English, would gingerly announce, “Olga is bad, very bad.” Years prior, when grandmother visited us in the…
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We save lives. Writing comes from a more mysterious place than any of us have words to describe. The ability to craft words that land across space and time into…
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Image Credit: Land use maps produced by the Works Progress Administration in 1934. They render the Pacific Palisades area all the way to the Municipal Airport (at the time) along the Pacific…
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Dear Uncle R., Here’s what the stories have told me: you died in 1987 at home, not in Vietnam. I was born in 1990. My coworker—an army reserve who saw…
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I’ve been living in exile for forty-two years now, about half of them away from home. If that’s as good a line as I think, it’s because, as Lao Tzu…
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There’s no such thing as nonfiction. This might seem like the title of yet another essay on the merits of essayistic writing as its own genre and not just a…
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Image Credit: Eliza Moore 1 I imagine Walt Whitman’s body Walt Whitman, an. American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual, eating and drinking…
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2.5 mg) This is not a tale of transformation, nor of trauma. The past and future keep splitting away, like cloven wood. Even the present—that urgent word, a disheveled storm—can’t…
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“Dear Journal, I am Emily May. I am ten years old. I am not sure what I am going to be for Halloween”: so began the first page of my…
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Image Credit: All grave site photos by Sarah Laurentius The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world.” William S. Burroughs …
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“Don’t say mourning. It’s too analytical. I’m suffering.” —Roland Barthes, from a journal kept after his mother’s death…
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For me, literacy was discovered in the Windy City’s cruel, winter howl—the intertwining of English, Spanish, and Polish a language all its own. Growing up in the Chicago Polish neighborhood…
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