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Addiction and Recovery

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

His Body Of Work

I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.

By Doug Crandell November 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What I Don’t Tell My Wife

There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.

By Craig Reinbold August 2023
Readers Write

Drug Experiences

Mushrooms in the desert, pot on a family vacation, black hash on a nuclear submarine

By Our Readers February 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Beacon

I felt a flash of hope for you, even though I knew — because of the distant and resigned tone of your voice — that you were going to die soon.

By John Paul Scotto March 2022
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Penned

Drugs can make us do stupid things — though, to be fair, drugs can also help us meet formidable demands. Meth can make you work hard as hell, the way my mom did, doing a full-time job at a farm-equipment company on weekdays and part-time retail jobs on weekends, until it all came crashing down.

By Jonathan Winston Jones December 2021
Fiction

America America

My granddaughter barely speaks. Her name is Effie, which in Greek means “well-spoken.” Maybe in Greece she would be. Names aren’t expected to match the person. If they were, we’d be named upon our death, when someone would have a stab in the dark at getting it right.

By Douglas Silver November 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Very Brutal Game

A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.

By Margo Steines October 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Les Calanques

I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.

By Melissa Febos September 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Seaside

When James is high, he is at his most affectionate. He becomes generous with hugs. He kisses my face all over, eyelids and all. I am ashamed that I like this about his addiction.

By Janelle Greco July 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Now And Then I Look For You

Two alleys down from the bodega, where I found you that time. Under the defunct, overturned hot tub that once or twice served as your roof.

By Natalie Kusz September 2019