The colossal singularity of thousands of sweaty, jostling bodies, a nearly tangible energy bursting through the air, and enough strobing stage lights to make even the fiercest epileptic wary – these are the things I remember from the concerts of my youth.
The old ladies sit and wait to die. While they are waiting they might play Bingo or have their hair done, but do not be fooled. What they really want to do is die.
I tell Joel that I’m late and ask him if I should go get a test. I watch as the meaning of what I just said moves across his eyes, darkening them. He tells me to wait a few days. He says he’s not ready to hear the answer.
After my hopes of having sex with my lesbian friends were dashed, there was a lot of talk about how exactly I would catch and transport my sperm to them for insemination.
It won’t happen again for a thousand years, the article said. That was enough for me to set the alarm for fifteen minutes before four on a Saturday, even though Richard and I were warm under the hand-sewn quilt, in a cabin whose walls gave off the aroma of wood smoke.
My therapist told me in one of our first sessions that children internalize the voices of their parents. Our decisions are directly influenced by what Mommy and Daddy told us about ourselves. That’s why I was in therapy in the first place…
In his memoir, In the Memory of the Map (University of Iowa Press, 2012), Christopher Norment introduces readers to cartography, otherwise known as map-making. Norment translates his experiences into written word through revealing his own map of life in pursuit of the trail ahead. It is through this picturesque book that readers are given a…
Graduate of Yale and Columbia Journalism School, Ted Morgan recounts his service to the French army in his memoir, My Battle of Algiers (Smithsonian Books, 2005).
I thought about making an April Fool’s Day joke in our monthly email or hidden somewhere in the new issue, but I am terrible at making things up – that’s why I love nonfiction. It’s the brilliant stuff you CAN’T make up!
Most writers are seekers, restless. If we were satisfied with the here-and-now, the exactly-as-it-is, there would be no call to wander, to imagine otherwise. We pick at all the seams. We pry the edges of “what if?” We are good at doubt and wonder, at the possible and maybe.
