I tell her I have just two memories of childhood: the night my father died and the day our house burned in a fire. I am seeking to remember something else, anything else, from my life before I was eleven.
The Rabbit Hole
The First Time
It’s a crisp, cold Saturday night and barring any unforeseen disasters, it will be the night. The night that I finally break the hold my ex-husband, Jack, has over me and spread my legs for another man.
Falling for You, City
All day it’s been hot; you can’t walk from the market to your room—just three blocks in total—without needing a shower at the end of it. Why isn’t anyone else dripping with sweat, you wonder as you walk as slowly as you can down the shady side of the street.
Arms Wide Open delivers message about motherhood, Mother Earth
The civil unrest of the sixties and seventies has been over for almost fifty years, but in Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Journey, Patricia Harman (Beacon Press) manages to remind my generation (Generation X), and generations after, exactly what it was that those hippies were trying to accomplish.
My Mother, The Darwinist Shopper
In the catacombs of the Belz Factory Outlet Mall hung a pair of rayon Day-Glo orange shorts with a fat black elastic waistband, the missing piece to my patchwork fashion sense. My mother didn’t flinch when I pulled it off the steel carousel with “clearance” in starburst font on top.
Everlasting Gobstoppers Aren’t Really Everlasting
My husband runs, too, but to say that we are both runners is like saying that the man who gave us “Pants on the Ground” and Beethoven are both musicians. Already forgot “Pants on the Ground” and the man who gave it to us? Exactly.
Panic of Birds
You are five years old. You play with Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Ponies and have three Cabbage Patch Kids. You cry every night when you think no one is listening. Your mother walks in on you and asks what’s wrong and you look up at her with 40-year old eyes and say, “I don’t know.” Mother takes you to see a “talking doctor,” as she calls it. A doctor for you to talk to, Lisa. You climb into the gigantic leather chair and notice all the spider plants hanging from the ceiling. You aren’t too interested in this man; you want to swing from the vines of the plants.
The Art is in the Details
What makes you fall in love with writing? What makes you tumble into the story on the page the minute the words enter your body?
For me, it’s the details. I care about the music of the language and what the writing has to teach me about people and life; in the end, I want those bigger themes to change me. But as I read creative nonfiction, and the world of story rises before me, I want to see it, taste it, smell it, hear it, and feel it on my skin.
Waking Up
There was a knock on the door. The door was open, but she knocked anyway. I didn’t know it then, but she wasn’t allowed to enter the room. “Hey.” she said. “Did you just get here?” This seemed to me a pointless question – we both knew I had just gotten there.
Rig
When the phone rings on Sunday night I know it’ll be him. I answer chirpily, like I always do. And like always we talk about where the rig is right now, what the weather is like with him, what the weather is like here, little nuggets of nothing.
