Blog
On Sam Mountain
| February 22, 2021 At the peak—932 feet above the Mekong floodplain—beyond the holy caves and the Cham, Buddhist, Hindu, and Mother-Goddess temples that litter the twisting pilgrim road, a mother and father are teaching their young son how to pray.
“The Babysitter” by Anton DiSclafani: Writing the Braided Essay
| February 15, 2021 I’ll admit it—I’m a sucker for a good woven essay. Call it a braided or challah essay, give it two strands, give it four. I’m drawn to them, and when I read a good one, I find myself pulling the pieces apart, trying to master the art of it.
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Purse Candy
| February 15, 2021 There's a single, beat-up black jack bobbing around my purse, its wrapper feathered from accidental collisions with lipstick tubes and wallet, the once-bright stripes gone gray. The taffy inside is stone hard but still offers up a spicy licorice warmth.
The Perfect Day
| February 8, 2021 The images are still with me thirty-five years later. The weather in the Northeast Michigan woods on Grand Lake is warm, heavy with fragrance of late summer, cedar pines, sandy soil, the water clapping the edge of the land. The turquoise sky turns to twilight with a soft glow of lavender rising.
The People We Once Were
| February 5, 2021 At the heart of Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s impressive debut is the moment when, after being found by her mother in a state of distress, she winds up, at eighteen, in a locked hospital ward and is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Keywords: book review
2019 - The Rock Cycle by Kevin Honold
February 5, 2021 The past is a living thing, palpable as the weather. In this collection of essays, Kevin Honold explores themes of history and its fading significance in modern American life. "Remembrance is morbid, unprofitable," he writes. "It's impractical,
Wildflowers
| February 1, 2021 Another set of packed bags. After another get out now. This time my mother, sister, and I landed in a trailer across the abandoned tracks. Fake wood paneling on the walls repelled all light, and years of cigarette smoke made every surface feel singed.
Le Sacrifice
| January 25, 2021 Mom, sitting on the floor among a group of cross-legged Girl Scouts, teaches us a song in a language none of us know.
Leeches
| January 18, 2021 When we get home from the hospital, I realize the electrodes are still stuck to my father's chest and back. He says that it hurt too much when the nurse tried to remove them, so he told her to forget it. The confusion makes him this way, irritable and impatient.
Drawn In
| January 11, 2021 I got better at drawing when I began to think of petting an animal. I sent my eye running along the spine of a thing, felt it warm and alive, arching its back into my palm. I moved my eye like I'd move my hand, stroking an edge, pressing against the body of a mass.
Meditative Naturalist, Intimate Essayist, Visionary Author
| January 8, 2021 I began reading the essays of Scott Russell Sanders when I encountered “The Inheritance of Tools” in The Best American Essays 1987. I’ve collected his books of essays ever since and, as a life-long resident of Great Lakes states, have felt a strong sense of identification with works like Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, Writing From the Center, and Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys.
Keywords: book review
Rubber Tourniquets
| January 4, 2021 My four-year-old son plays with the blue rubber tourniquet from his latest hospitalization. A nurse tied it around his arm to insert an IV into the tender part of his forearm near the crook of his elbow.
You Should Ask for More
| December 28, 2020 "Am I sad?" I ask my dog, because it's not something I recognize anymore. Sadness had come so thick and urgent for a while that the quieter emotions don't register like they used to.
Car Keys
| December 21, 2020 “I can drive today,” my partner said, and I tossed him the keys over the hood of my 1999 Jeep Cherokee. Up went the key to my mom’s house, which opened a small home of wall-papered, floral prints and a retired woman shuffling in a bathrobe, slowing sipping coffee . . .
The Ledge
| December 14, 2020 We've come to Switzerland and we're in love. It's the crisp air, the towering waterfalls and majestic peaks – a guise to hide the death that lurks behind the exquisite landscape where we've flocked to feel alive.
Real Mom
| December 7, 2020 Until I decided to come to Korea, I hadn't realized how special my mother was – how selfless, how enlightened. Most adoptive parents of her generation can't understand that searching for our origins isn't a direct affront to them. In truth, it has nothing to do with them at all.
Reckoning with Not-Knowing
| December 2, 2020 Two wonderfully readable recent books probe the authors’ past losses in order to reimagine their and our futures. Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson and The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky look towards Norway, France, and the influence Northern Europe has long had on American thought.
Keywords: book review
Jars of Daybreak
| November 30, 2020 Roused before dawn, my siblings and I stood at the edge of the kitchen and marveled at gleaming red jars that filled the room. Our parents shuffled wordlessly from stove to kitchen table and back again, their bright faces like blacksmiths' flushed by forge light . . .
After Hours
| November 23, 2020 My grandfather wakes, confused and flooded with his body's toxins. "Sit down," he tells my grandmother. "We're going around a bend." He thinks they're on the train forty years ago. He reaches for invisible handholds . . .
The China Tea Set
| November 16, 2020 The china tea set, wrapped in tissue paper, nestles in its warped cardboard box on the shelf inside my mother's wardrobe. She draws it down gently, as though not to wake it, places it on the bed, slides the lid off.
Photograph
| November 9, 2020 I push through the brambles and climb over the rotting, peeling fence that inevitably grabs at the cuff of my pants. Getting snagged, I always seem to fall cursing onto the beach, an unfitting way to enter the quiet beauty.
What It Means to Bless
| November 2, 2020 In 1959, twelve-year-old Orr rises early with his three brothers, heads to the field with their father. They shoot their rifles and kill a deer. Just as they celebrate, Orr’s gun goes off again, this time killing his eight-year-old brother, Peter.
Keywords: book review
A Good Day to Die
| November 2, 2020 What I remember is the salt that formed in his pores like crystalline grains of sand. A million tiny specks covering his skin. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. The hospice nurse said that this meant his sweat glands were shutting down, squeezing out the last drops of his life.
The door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges
| October 26, 2020 I open the door to see if you're there, the door with the fresh coat of turquoise paint and brass hinges. There is a noise, a constant; it could be the rain or the thick of my heart in my eardrums. I've never heard this sound before . . .
Michael Dinkel
October 19, 2020Michael Dinkel studied art and creative writing at St. John’s University in Collegeville Minnesota and at the University of Alaska in Anchorage where he lives.
Keywords: 22-1
Megan Harlan
October 19, 2020Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2020.
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Ren Jones
October 19, 2020Ren Jones earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the College of Charleston.
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J. Malcolm Garcia
October 19, 2020J. Malcolm Garcia is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon 2009); What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten (University of Missouri Press 2014); Without A Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans (Skyhorse Press 2017); Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories (Skyhorse Press 2018); and The Fruit Of All My Grief: Lives In the Shadows of the American Dream (Seven Stories Press 2019).
Keywords: 22-1
