Writing Life
On Writing Like a Motherfucker*
I’ve read and heard a lot of writers talk about their relationship with a particular talisman–I forget who has a mug with Gold Letters that spell Writer across it. Some of my friends paste quotations in their writing spaces. Some writers advise the utmost in tidiness, a veritable sensory vacuum, or discomfort, or writing with […]
AWP Makes Me Sleepy, Inky, and Blissful
There’s a whole bunch of post-AWP posts this morning. Here’s one I like most, my friend Beth wrote it. Beth is my new in-person friend. My friend Jamie is why we know each other. Jamie is a good yenta. The Missouri review posted this. This guy I met is the editor of this great site, […]
A Good Chat, a Good Chap: Writing About Alive People
One of the many things that I laugh at myself about is that I’m 32. There’s really no call for me to be writing a memoir. I’ve got no business. I don’t think it would matter what I was working on, I’d feel like I had no business writing it. Another thing that gives me […]
A Shower With My Sister: 2004
I was pregnant. I was also unwed, reading The Scarlet Letter, and really knowing what an utter turd ball Dimmesdale is. It was near the holidays, and I was still “seeing” the fetus’s father. But not seeing him in the forever way, in the “we’re in this mess together” way. I visited home for Christmastime […]
Letter to my daughter’s “father”
Dear Paddy, That’s what I call you now, in my mind. It is more interesting than your proper name, and you’ll know why I picked it. I’ve been meaning to write to you, to say thank you for the girl. It’s two days less than a month until your 32nd birthday. On your birthday I […]
I got rid of half of my books: 2013
Until recently, half of what I own was books. Now, perhaps a quarter. I sat down with my book collection and I culled it. I looked at titles that I’d read, and would probably not read again, even my recently usurped *favorite* book which I owned in hardcover was tossed into a bin for donating. […]
Santa’s Penis: 1989
I am probably eight years old. We are at Rehoboth Beach in one of the many junk shops where we purchased two hermit crabs earlier in the week: one for me, one for my brother, with whom I have stopped bathing since he noted the first sprouts of pubic hair as I held a contortionist’s […]
Writing in Church: 2013
My friend and neighbor, we’ll call her Stella, started working at a church last summer. She’s working here Monday through Thursday nine to one. She invited me to write here today since the pastor is on vacation. I accepted because, though I have tended to avoid church, in the tiny, rural town in which I […]
Disappointing the Christian Republicans, It Hurts: 1997 – present
The last bit of this reads like I’m a PhD. I’m not. I have a BA in English. In the larger piece, that is clear before you get here. Hanging out with some friends this weekend, we were talking about our parents and how it’s easy to say, “I don’t care what they think,” but […]
The Misogynist Rhetoric Runs Deep: 1980 – present
This is the beginning of a piece about sexual assault: It is deep inside me, a sliver of an idea, an idea that I have tried to banish by reading feminist criticism, by performing in The Vagina Monologues, by reading those sad, captioned photos online that have rape victims holding white signs with handwritten quotations […]
