genre: Nonfiction

How Much Time Do You Want For Your Progress?

By Allen M. Price

How long have I in bondage lain, And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain– Deprived of liberty. On Liberty and Slavery George Moses Horton thisismyschoolitisbeigethereismrshickey sheisnicesheismyteachersheissmilingilike hersmilesmilemrshickeysmilesheisplaying withherpapershereismyfirstgrade classroomthekidsareplayingwearehappy thereismeiambymyselfiamcoloringiseea kidbuildingwithblocksiwanttoplaycome andplayhelaughscaniplaywithyouhewill notplaywithmelaughingandplayingicryhe playsalltheotherkidsstareatmemrshickey walksoversheisfrowninghewillnotplaywith mewhynothisparentswillnotallowhimto playwithniggersirunhomeafterschool runningandrunningtomymomitakeoffthe keytiedroundmyneckandopenthedoor momisatworkmydogladyjumpsonmewoof woofshebarkssheisspringerspanielsheis brownandblackandwhitelikemewewillplay chaseiwillrunshewillchaseirunandirun runningandrunningiamstillrunningaway this is my school it is beige… Read more »

Double Incision Diary

By Jendi Reiter

On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake. * On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its… Read more »

Can Abacuses Count That High?

By Amber Wong

The sharp staccato of Cantonese swirled around Ming’s Restaurant as twelve of us sat, shoulders almost touching, at a round banquet table. Steam billowed from the swinging kitchen doors, wafting a seductive scent of steamed buns and ginger. For a moment I was a child again, going to yum cha with my parents after… Read more »

A Minute of Silence

By Adriana Páramo

I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over… Read more »

Bound

By Beverly Burch

Typewritten pages buried in an obscure book. Yellowing, unlined, composed by my mother with penciled corrections in her hand, they told family history in fits and starts, gleaned from my grandmother’s memory. On a wintry day, they fell out of the book so I sat on the floor to read them because my mother’s voice… Read more »

Why is it so hard to take up space?

By Thuy Phan

I. Because you are only 5 feet 1.5 inches tall, and your limbs only stretch so far. You often speed-walk to keep pace with anyone over 6 feet. Because your family tells you that you didn’t drink enough milk while you were growing up. Because you hate the taste of it. As… Read more »

The Virility of Memory

By Anne C. Wheeler

Mike Hippler wanted to be remembered. That’s what he told me, through the pages of his journal, approximately 31 years after he died from AIDS on April 4, 1991. When I arrived at the GLBT Historical Society, in the basement of a beautiful building on a seedy street in San Francisco, I knew that I… Read more »

A Piece of Cloth

By Nada Siddiqui

Rain splattered against our bedroom window on a chilly spring weekend morning. I burrowed deeper under the thick cotton comforter, tightened my arms around my husband’s trim waist, and rubbed the lingering wetness of tears on my cheekbones off on his soft sleep T-shirt. That morning, I didn’t want to be comforted or to comfort.… Read more »

Her Hair

By Omid Fallahazad

When I pick up my 9-year-old daughter from school, the first thing she does, as soon as she clambers up onto the backseat and dumps her heavy backpack aside, is to squeeze her petit torso between the two front seats and, like a trained parakeet, bend her head to offer me my bribe, a kiss… Read more »

Internal Logic

By Tobey Ward

The test was supposed to be a precaution. I had an IUD, but my period had been light that month, only a few drops of blood. When I put the white stick on the counter, two lines appeared instantly. I was pregnant. This was in the bathroom, in our house in South Philly. A floor-to-ceiling… Read more »

Nature’s Push

By Matt Paczkowski

Water Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) In February of 1995, when I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother had a nightmare. In her dream, she was at Rockaway Beach with her mother and me – three generations – and I waddled through the sand toward the waves. When she reminisces, my mother mentions the weather first, how… Read more »

White Kids’ Nightmares

By Gail Griffin

Cri de Coeur Some years ago, in a workshop on whiteness I was leading, a delegation from the local Friends’ Meeting was among the participants. One of them was a very elderly woman, so disabled she was nearly bent double and moved slowly, with great difficulty. I’m saying she had every excuse to stay home.… Read more »

Graphology

By Dickson Lam

1 I think of letters as faces. 2 You want that E to look like it’s uppercutting somebody. 3 Back in the day in Chicago, gangs used to have gang cards—almost like a business card—and there were all sorts of dope logos and images and especially lettering. 4 By the way a person writes, you… Read more »

A New Lesson on an Old Hill

By Natasha Israni

Last summer I climbed an English hill my seven-year-old son said I shouldn’t. On a family road-trip across the United Kingdom, while walking around a sparkling, oval tarn in the verdant Lake District, we reached a fork. So far, we had strolled past giant oaks and leafy copses, quaint fences, and mellow glades—a pleasant enough… Read more »

Back and Forth

By Brandy E. Wyant

My thoughts won’t turn off long enough to let me fall asleep, so I watch dog agility competitions in bed on my phone. After watching dog after dog attempt the same course, and inevitably commit the same errors in the same places, my eyes start to grow heavy. I know to let another dog or… Read more »

A Sense of An Ending

By Gary Percesepe

Ghosts Years ago, I found a picture of my mother and father with their first-born son. Tommy is perhaps two years old, balanced on my father’s knee. All three look straight at the camera and smile, dressed in their fifty’s finery. They appear to be in a photography studio, posing for a family portrait. But… Read more »

As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book by Anne-Marie Oomen

By Bronwyn Jones

As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book by Anne-Marie Oomen We will all experience mother loss. Yet, our mothers are also eternally with us, their formative presences lodging in our beings in ways that run the gamut from interstitial balm to sharp-edged irritant. How we lose our mothers is shaped by a larger

Attention, Humor, Curiosity, and Poetry. Writing While Parenting by Ben Berman

By Richard Hoffman

Writing While Parenting Ben Berman Able Muse Press ISBN: 978-1-77349-111-0 One might think a book titled Writing While Parenting would be filled with tips about time- and stress management, about how to straddle the competing demands of parenthood and authorship, but the brief, incisive, funny, profound, and memorable essays in Ben Berman’s book offer us

The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey

By Richard Cambridge

The Beloved Republic Steven Harvey Wandering Aengus Press, 2023 “The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me.” So begins “A Whole Life” Steven Harvey’s preface that, like the taproot of the tree, anchors the collection of essays in The Beloved Republic. Written over a quarter of

Fairyland, an Interview with Alysia Abbott

By Lorena Hernández Leonard

During our first week of class Alysia Abbott asked “If your memoir was made into a movie, what actor or actress would play you?” The next week, all ten of us memoirists came back with our answers: Salma Hayek, Annette Bening, Claire Danes, Sigourney Weaver… It was June 2021 and I had just embarked on… Read more »