I became an English teacher to help students feel a bit less lonely in the world through the literature we read. Identifying with other characters who also were lonely, like Juliet, sometimes seemed to work. How odd it must seem that one’s isolation might dissipate when reading about someone else feeling lonely, but there it is.
(nonfiction)
Women & Children First bookstore opened November 9, 1979, in Chicago. Chelsey Clammer writes about working there from 2006 to 2011, where she healed, sold books, and did Burlesque.
(nonfiction)
Earlier I heard the server compare ube’s flavor to marshmallows, which irritated me. I didn’t like how my homeland sweet was reduced to something as common as marshmallows. It is so much more.
(fiction)
In a sense, post-truth and post-Trump, MAD’s cynically absurd reality has replaced our “reality-based” world. Its outsider and jaundiced view of media, institutions, and those who’ve “made it,” has become de rigueur in American culture.
(nonfiction)
I had a long, marginally successful career for someone so young and talentless.
(The Loop)
Someone at the SPCA created a Facebook page for Mittens in 2018, as a way of discouraging Wellingtonians from dropping him off at the shelter. “Mittens is not lost,” the page says.
(nonfiction)
“Thank god you weren’t injured,” people said after the Flashlight Man, but while I wait to get my cast off, many projects halted by my inability to type, I consider this: Was I injured back then?
(nonfiction)
“If you want to be a writer, you get to be one forever. Sometimes that means big chunks of time where you are not building sentences because you’re living the experiences that you’re going to build the work out of. So drop the shame about it,” Megan Stielstra tells Barbara West.
(interview)
Well, real estate agents can make magical things happen you know. I’ll ask them to paint the room. How about a beige?
(drama)
“That which befell you neither occurred nor didn’t occur”
“At the end of every season”
“Discover the place where you live”
(poetry)
When one language dies by ceasing to be spoken or otherwise embodied, so too perishes an entirely singular way of being human.
(nonfiction)
Fast-forward twenty-something years and here I am, with my own children on the block and a refrigerator full of herbs, greens, fruits, and vegetables.
(nonfiction)
He isn’t here today, and his empty desk seemed emptier than all the other empty desks, where half of the students saw an opportunity to capitalize on tragedy and get a day out of school.
(nonfiction)
“Roberts has described her work as “vignettes of meaningless experiences,” but this meandering, nonlinear work feels honest in its making mountains out of molehills” write reviewers Nora Hickey and Amaris Feland Ketcham.
(graphic nonfiction review)
If my father wanted me to know about Armenia, why hadn’t he said, “Here, Peter, read this,” or “Son, did I ever tell you what happened to Armenia?”
(nonfiction)
In both cases—the poem and the trembling couple—I seem to love the very thing that raises questions for me in my own life: I love how settled the pizza eaters and the bean eaters are with each other.
(nonfiction)
“In Stepanova’s voyage there is life and death, silence and narrative, memory and oblivion” writes reviewer Marek Makowski.
(fiction review)
My job is this: be what the others are not.
(drama)
Most of the lies were about my mother, but I only learned about the lies years later at my mother’s deathbed
(fiction)
“Can we go to your place?” I asked at the coffee shop after he said that Blue Nights was Didion’s magnum opus. I argued in favor of Magical Thinking but he said the most feverish hallucinations of grief shone through her later work.
(nonfiction)
To know how to exploit the weaknesses in human nature in order to best serve Christ is one of the paradoxes of the inquisitor’s calling.
(fiction)
After the woman / tells him how that first night really went. After months pass, / and this child is born. After this child’s first birthday, / first day of school, First Communion, first love, / first loss, first child, that child’s first introduction to Grandpa.
(nonfiction)
“Faces”
“In Contemplation of an ‘Ornamental’ Banana Tree on the Grounds of a Resort While Vacationing”
“Antoine’s Graft”
“A Quiet State After Some Period of Disturbance”
“Exalted or Worthy of Complete Devotion”
Another Chicago Magazine 