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Adolescence
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
Readers Write
Fuel
Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee
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
Readers Write
Shaving
A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face
July 2024
Photography
To the Bone
“To the Bone” is an ongoing photography project documenting daily life and work on a small family farm in the Hudson Valley. Emily, a single mother, manages their small farm with the help of her children. My intention is to explore the strength, dignity and love that keeps them deeply connected as a family, to each other and to their unique way of life on the farm.
July 2024
Fiction
A Knife at the Throat
We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
July 2024
Fiction
Compare and Contrast
I just read The Diary of Anne Frank, about a girl who hid from the Nazis. There are many similarities but also differences between us: When she started the diary, she was thirteen, and I will be thirteen in August. We are both girls, and, like her, I have many secrets and depressed emotions. I never hated my mom the way Anne hated hers, but last spring I came close.
June 2024
Readers Write
Uniforms
For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran
June 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Occupation: Fool
Any comedian will tell you, losing an audience’s attention for even a split second can snowball. Handle it wrong, and you may die onstage like Elvis on the toilet, like Lenny Bruce beside the toilet, like William Howard Taft in a bathtub near a toilet.
May 2024
Fiction
Bridge Kid
As I was dabbing up cookie crumbs, the toddler appeared at the top of the stairs, sucking his thumb and crying. Only then did it occur to me that the boys had not been back up in some time. I patted his damp hair and went to check on his brothers.
April 2024
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