The older generation of course, they didn’t teach their kids about the horrors of Stalin, because they didn’t want them to have that memory.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
Tag: Nonfiction
The rage rolls out of my gut like a stream of regurgitated frogs, leaving me purged and primed for violence.
(nonfiction)
With every photo either zoomed in or close-up, I tend to forget how small they are. Nudibranchs range from four millimeters up to 520 millimeters.
(nonfiction)
I trip on cobblestones sticking out of the earth like busted tombstones.
(nonfiction)
He knew the affair he was having with the composer, that it should have been me.
(nonfiction)
Can a town named Phoenix rise from the ash?
(nonfiction)
Beneath the tree, grasses of pale yellow and green commingle to create a neon shade reminiscent of Mello Yello, a soda from my childhood….
(nonfiction)
I was in Colorado because seventy-plus hour workweeks punctuated by martinis had swallowed me whole.
(nonfiction)
“Nature is healing,” says a small tin sign in front of a dried up cornfield.
(nonfiction)
As the world began to open again, we were proud. We’d done a good job. Then you came.
(nonfiction)
Those smuggled copies of Interview and The Witching Hour that I took with me and read and reread in the suffocatingly dark and overly zealous world that was my conversion therapy experience got me from one moment to the next.
(nonfiction)
“It could be that our hearts beat in perfect alignment. Yet, it does not seem that Paul and I ever could have aligned ourselves so precisely.”
(nonfiction)
In New Zealand, we don’t do class warfare like the British do, although we bring it with us. Ours isn’t as refined. But it’s just as complex and many times more insidious.
(nonfiction)
I mentioned the most important aspect once we were out of the taxi and waiting for the electric-blue bus: never fall asleep. The ride’s purpose was not to get comfortable or distracted.
(nonfiction)
“I think that as long as you treat your characters with compassion, and you’re thoughtful and empathic and you do what you can to support their narrative and their truths,” Emily Maloney tells Barbara West.
(interview)
We were excited to go to Ukraine
because we were promised a disco night in Donbas organized by a local Young Pioneer
group, a junior division of the Communist Party.
(nonfiction)
In a text to a friend, months after the last time I see her I say, “She still has my heart.”
“You’ll want to get that back,” he says.
(nonfiction)
After the death of University of Iowa nonfiction force Carl Klaus, three writers reflect about his impact and influence.
(nonfiction)
“Wilkinson’s knowledge of horticulture helps to connect the themes of family, inheritance, and existence to the greater world around us, to all living things,” writes reviewer Meredith Boe.
(nonfiction)
I might have pounded on the door or tried to break the window or loudly insisted on the key. And I might have awakened an angry, unbalanced and much stronger man.
(nonfiction)
Transit Authority regulations required drivers, young and old, to wear bland gray ties around the collars of our bland gray uniform shirts in addition to gray regulation sweaters and jackets, but after checking in for our routes for the day and transfer books many of us hotshots replaced our ties with tropical bandanas as a way of putting a little color into the city’s frequent gray days.
(nonfiction)
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)
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)
That need for a map—to marriage? To love? To sex? To life?—seems to have dominated the lives of my parents, who vied for their analyst’s attentions like children for that of a favorite babysitter.
(nonfiction)
I was twenty-two in 1992. Death was all around me. Working at the community center was only my second or third job after college; I thought it was usual, even ordinary, for people who you worked with every day to die.
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 