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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Formed Otherwise
There’s a presumption that to raise a child with disabilities makes you brave. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t always a stellar mother, either. But I studied my daughter as if she were an ancient text to see what was beneath the chatter and the rage
June 2026
The Feeding
Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.
June 2026
The Good End of Pleasant Street
When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.
June 2026
Our Fraying Hearts
I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.
June 2026
Struck
I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.
May 2026
My Bowstring Heart
On the field I was all animal instinct and brute force—a bruiser, a bone breaker. Every tackle was a rebuke against a life where fathers die. When I played rugby, I wasn’t a broke, lost little girl. I wasn’t a struggling amateur writer. I had goals. I was a winner. I was MVP. I was someone.
May 2026
Home Invasions
Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.”
May 2026
Ghosts of the Small Rooms
To be a government researcher in a prison is to straddle two different roles. The women I talked to understood that I worked for the institution that incarcerated them. In this way I was just like the corrections officers who locked them in each night. But I was different too.
April 2026
Practice Losing Everything
I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.
April 2026
A Conversation with My Father
You could make things up that actually felt more like truth, somehow. You could build a world so precise that other people started to believe it, too. And if you didn’t believe the things my dad said, he’d find a way to make you.
April 2026
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