I’m so delighted that my essay “Drawing a Breath” was included in the just published anthology Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays (University Press of Colorado, 2017). The essay originally appeared in Prairie Schooner (Vol. 90, Issue 2). Hugest thanks to editor Stephanie G’Schwind at the Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing for her editorial role in shaping such…Read More
Still Life
Want to write with me this summer? Enroll in my online course through the Loft Literary Center called “Still Life: Writing Memoir and Personal Essays with and about Photographs.” In “Still Life,” we will explore the relationship between memory, imagination, and photography as we write with and about photographs—photographs culled from both personal collections and images found…Read More
“On Weather: A Cold Front”
An excerpt: “Sensitivities bared, I made myself a lightning rod. For sunshine lost to cloud cover. For heat’s remove, cold creep of goosebumps on skinned knees. For wind around me. For leaves in the crabapple tree gone twitching, a receipt cartwheeling the street, quick-winged robin flight, the rose bush by the split-rail fence giving up…Read More
“Ossification”
Find the full text of “Ossification,” winner of the 2015 Michael Steinberg Essay Prize, in Issue 18 of Fourth Genre. An excerpt: “On Saturday mornings, my mother used to wake us with the radio and the sound of the vacuum cleaner while my father started the lawnmower in the backyard; pollen drifted in the screens of my…Read More
“A Pattern”
An excerpt: “How to knit my care into textiles, sew it up in the stuffing? Here, for my family to hold: tangible proof of connections. And yet, I know now, mothers worry when their children play with proof. Gifts rendered too precious for use instead sit on nursery shelves, distant and out of touch. I…Read More
“Making Light”
An excerpt: “It appears as if the lightning bug is trapped in a glass bottle. A small child’s hands might hold it close to her eyes, so close her eyes might cross until she blinks behind her glasses. It’s mesmerizing how the curved glass magnifies the bug. She can see the split of its two wings along…Read More