An archive of all of the personal essays we’ve published at Hippocampus Magazine over the years.
When we bought the Blazer, it was a kind of joke…Caught between city lives we loved and the country lives we’d been born into, we were torn between being the sort of people who owned a vehicle like that and people who scorned people who owned a vehicle like that.
It’s a gray December afternoon. There’s dirty forgotten snow on the ground and a warning of rain in the air. It’s the Sunday before Christmas, and I’m going to a holiday party.
I don’t remember any of the rides we caught that day between the time we got our jaywalking tickets and the time we were standing on I-80 at one of the Lake Tahoe interchanges.
JAWS. I clutched my stomach as though the word itself had taken a bite out of me. My father planned to take us to see the actual Jaws, the shark that terrorized a nation.
Travel-weary and craving the mystical, we asked the ranger about this quiet area, south of the more popular Grand Canyon. Were there any good hikes nearby?
… my houseplant has been through a lot. It’s a seven-year-old jade, and it’s never lived in any house longer than five months before having to move again.
There are three safe topics that I can talk about with my dad – the law, downhill skiing, and jazz. The first two are of interest solely to him, but the last we share.
Standing behind the Green Gables Elementary School library with my best friend, Marnie. “There is something I have to tell you.” … Marnie missed gymnastics the day the team was told.
He started with T-ball at five—tiny tykes swinging eagerly, determinedly, sometimes tearfully, in a fierce contest with a stationary ball—and stayed with it through the finely honed and competitively groomed “majors,” the top rung of Little League.
COMMON APPLICATION FOR UNDERGRADUATE COLLEGE ADMISSION Please write an essay on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below. This personal essay helps us to become acquainted with you as a person and student, apart from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will also demonstrate your ability…
