I piled everything into a boxy folding cart, the kind only New Yorkers use because we don’t have cars to haul junk in, and pushed it to Goodwill, around the corner on Second Avenue. It was my seventh trip that week.
Category: Creative Nonfiction
Reading The Feminine Mystique in Norman Mailer’s Home by Deirdre Sinnott
I was gazing out at Provincetown Bay through the enormous picture window in Norman Mailer’s home. Betty Friedan’s classic analysis, The Feminine Mystique, sat open on my lap. Jessica, an administrator of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, entered through the patio door, bringing in the chilly fall air and the news that Norris Church Mailer had died.
How I Got to be None of the Above by Alvin Burstein
When I arrived at the Army Induction Center in 1954, I was required to fill out a form so that my dog tags could be punched out. Among the information to be included, beyond name and serial number, was religious orientation. The choices were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or None. I chose the last.
1968: Chaos and Turmoil, in the Streets, in Our Bedroom by Amalia Pistilli Conrad
“Wake up! Wake up, little Amalia! Wake up, my daughter! We must go, we must go and turn your father in, he’s poisoning me and his stinky family is in cahoots!” The Mother pulls the covers off her nine-year-old daughter’s small body, warm with the scent of sleep and dreams.
Perfectionist by Vanessa Chastain Rivas
I read a passage, but I did not read it. Words entered and passed against the hardened nerves of a paralyzed brain. Trembling, trembling. Shriveled, calloused and jaded, the nerves registered nothing, transported no phrases through epic distances, and deciphered no code.
Playing Poohsticks by Anika Fajardo
The Colombian night air dances as the pool at the far end of the Termales de Coconuco slowly fills with tepid, sulfuric water. This is my first return visit to my birthplace, my first introduction to my father, a man who has been absent nearly all my life.
Urns by Nicole Oquendo
There’s not much about my father that I actually know. What I think I know now is that he’s getting skinnier by the year and old enough to stop doing things as he used to. Until the last few years or so, my father, in his sixties, passed for forty to strangers.
The House That Built Me by Cory Fosco
I live less than a mile away from my childhood home. It would take me about three minutes to get in my car and drive to my old street. On a nice day, I can walk there in less than fifteen.
Nothing Left by John M. Wills
The autumn season had yet to morph the colors of the summer leaves. A beautiful contrast of gold and green made for a serene scene on this Pennsylvania hillside… Were it not for the scar on the complexion of this vista, it would have been the quintessential postcard.
Firsts by Nathan Evans
The first time I kissed a girl, it all happened—the way defining events sometimes do—at four in the morning. We were in a student room the size of a large packing crate facing on to what might have been Oxford’s most modern and least lovely quadrangle.
