An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
My daughter Frances is a reader. Not that she’d appreciate me telling you this. She doesn’t like me to categorize her. Even though saying someone is a reader should be good. Right? It’s not like saying she’s a thief.
When he withdraws his right hand from the can, I see that it’s Cholo, one of the more dangerous mental patients and he has a blue plastic Gillette razor.
…here I was as the plane ascended, a 33-year-old, hunched over on my knees and harnessed to Don, a man who is supposedly in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most jumps out of an airplane…
At the wake, smoking was considered fine near the living, but thoughtless and disrespectful near the dead, so my grandmother and her sisters took a cigarette break in the downstairs lounge.
I was eight years old the first time my mother called me fat. I was living with my mother for the summer, as a reward for her being clean and sober.
Here’s something you might not actually know: Abbey Road is just an ordinary road. Surprising, given the notoriety of that irreverent Beatles album cover of the same name.
No dogs allowed. John said they would eat his tortoises. My husband was a whale biologist and many of the former residents of our California beach bungalow reflected this interest.
I chew the collars of my shirts until they’re ragged as my fingernails. This drives my mother crazier than when I used to chew my hair, which tasted like peppermint despite the fact that I did not use peppermint shampoo.
It begins in the dark of day. It begins with the turn of a key, a familiar road. The commute, the commute of years, begins without fanfare, without manifesto.
“Bobby, it’s me. We hear that you… ran into some difficulty yesterday.” A bit of an understatement, considering he collapsed on the trail and was carried out by a rescue team, but it’s what comes from my mouth.
