Browse Sections
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Eight Tenets
This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.
September 2025
Start with Overripe Bananas
You have to start with overripe bananas. Really overripe—not yellow with a couple of streaks but two thin-skinned ones that can hardly contain their own soft flesh. You should be able to smell banana from across your kitchen.
August 2025
A Good House
Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.
August 2025
Rough Road
Beat from cycling around town all morning collecting rejections, I scarfed down a fast-food burger that settled into my gut like wet plaster. I just wanted to sit in the air-conditioning and pretend things were going to be OK, but a kid in his polyester uniform started slinging ammonia water from a mop bucket, and the smell made my sinuses hurt.
August 2025
Brother, Electric
He grabs my hand, and static electricity snaps between us, as though he is coursing with energy. He blows his hot breath on my frozen fingertips and tells me it’ll be OK.
August 2025
Our Star
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as time. Then bang!—the first particles, cooling into the first atoms, clumping into the first nebular clouds, collapsing into the first stars, shining out the first light, unspooling over billions of years to make it all happen: the joy, the love, the pain, everything. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows. But here we go.
July 2025
Roots and Rhizomes
I know now that you aren’t born a parent. But you are born with inherited traits and proclivities that you end up either nurturing or starving out. Life, in my experience, requires a lot of deadheading. I’m glad my father taught me how to do it at such a young age.
July 2025
Driftless
Mike had grown up in a conservative rural town, and most of his family still lived in that area. His relatives tended to be more liberal than their neighbors, but there were differences between us. Some had told Mike they supported peaceful protesting, but not the rioting in Chicago and other cities, nor the looting that sometimes happened when groups of people marched through the city declaring that Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t like I supported rioting or looting either. That summer, I had shed silent tears the first time I’d ridden my bike down Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago’s busiest streets, past all the stores whose owners had preemptively boarded up their windows in case the protests turned violent. But I understood the protesters’ rage, because it was also mine. Sometimes, to make myself feel better, I fantasized about grabbing a baseball bat and ramming it through a window, any window, over and over and over again.
July 2025
Shimmer
We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.
July 2025
Collectors
For years I’ve hauled my own records from house to house, city to city, relationship to relationship. They’ve outlasted two marriages. They’ve outlasted my father. They’ve outlasted pets and therapists. I’ve got a few rare 45s and some treasured signed Smiths albums, but also twelve-inch singles that are warped or skip. I’ve often thought about getting rid of all of them. Like nearly everyone else, I get most of my music from an app these days. But I’ve kept them the way I’ve kept a few good friends. All of us collectors. All of us records of everything that’s been pressed into us over time.
June 2025
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today