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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Transvestite Freak
Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.
September 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
And These Too Are Defensive Wounds
I’d thought the transcripts would help me write a letter to the parole board, but when I opened them, I saw a section of my own testimony at Maynard’s trial, and that was that. My head filled with hissing static; my heart raced.
September 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Wedding Colors
Somehow my bubble went unpunctured for twenty-four years, allowing me and my coffee-colored skin to arrive in Hartford, Arkansas, blissfully ignorant of what my Blackness might mean in this place.
September 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Athens, Revised
Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.
August 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Beast in Your Head
We started swerving across the double line, back and forth, up hills where the headlights beamed into the canopy of the forest, leaving a pocket of darkness below, an open mouth from which an oncoming car could spit forth at any moment. I clutched the driver’s seat in front of me, bracing for impact. But each time, the car settled back onto the road, and we sped downhill again. And then there was nothing in the windshield but trees.
August 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Staying Tender
Listening to parents who are newly grieving, I notice the places where their voices break. It is not when they describe the concrete details of suffering and lifeless bodies; it is in the emptiness that follows.
August 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A House Is Not a Home
The buyer closed on the property in late April of this year. Despite all the logical, practical, convincing reasons for the sale, letting go wasn’t easy. The Sun’s offices had been in that house since 1989, and photos of its well-landscaped exterior had become familiar to subscribers, a couple dozen of whom would stroll up the front walk each year and knock on the door, hoping to get a glimpse of where their favorite magazine was produced and to meet the people who created it. If he was in, our founding editor, Sy Safransky, always welcomed them.
August 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
New Life
Since I had no one else to ask, I asked the hunger where it wanted to go. It said, West, like that was a point on the map called Freedom. So I drove west. I stopped at a Walmart somewhere in Kansas and bought a propane camp stove and a tent, because hotels were not in the budget.
July 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Canada Day
The drive from Homer, Alaska, to Casper, Wyoming, is more than three thousand miles, much of it on winding two-lane highways where moose and bears slip from the underbrush and stand in the road. It had already been a rough trip.
July 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Gift Shops of the American Wild
The Paradise Inn sits at 5,400 feet on the south slope of Mount Rainier, the highest peak in Washington State. Up here the air is thin and crisp, the colors are saturated, and every breeze carries an aroma of pine and the trill of birdsong. Even immersed in such concentrated beauty, my heart aches. For the hundredth time today I think of Jack, a fellow writer in the graduate program I recently completed. We bonded over our love of books and our homesickness for the Midwest.
June 2024
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