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My essay choices change with the class; summer workshop students always read Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” the perfect essay to dissect when learning how to write effectively about great loss without self-indulgence. 982 more words

No!

Here’s a video I made explaining why.

It started when we left the land. She was riding in her car with her best friend. I was in another car with a friend and my daughter. 2,251 more words

When my Dad was mad he’d threaten me with sixteen kinds of hurt.

There was the clip over the ear; the smack on the chops; the belt across my buttocks; the gut punch; the double fisted shirt grab; the single handed throat grip; the thrown object; the arse over tit shove; the chair knock over; the millimetre-close door slam; the bookcase pulldown; the plate slid across the table to smash and send food into my lap. 744 more words

I sometimes take a picture of you because you’re just so adorable and amazing and beautiful. And sometimes I catch a hint of fragility in what the camera catches. 888 more words

I grew up knowing —not believing— Grandma Nan could do anything. She could stoically kill a snake in her yard with an ax and resume tending to her collards in the garden — wearing a chiffon floral house dress. 1,167 more words

A few days ago my son and I went grocery shopping. As a general rule, I do not take my baby with me to grocery shop because as any mother of young children – my son turns seven next month – will tell you, a trip for groceries with the children turns into an event laden with begging, tantrums and running through the aisles. 1,289 more words

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. 3,720 more words

Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize races around the courtyard. 335 more words

A scene utterly ridden with (as opposed to rid of) flowers, or having that general sense or quality literally or metaphorically, is called florid. What about when there aren’t many flowers but there are a whole lot of leaves and other green things? 462 more words

Quitting drinking lifted me out of Crapsville. When I drank, I would often ponder why other people’s lives seemed to be so much more productive and together than my own messy, unsatisfying and occasionally frightening existence. 460 more words

My mother and I were in Bristol, visiting someone. A cousin, or something. We were having tea—like this. Our hostess … and her teenage daughter. I would’ve been nine or ten. 459 more words

Last year, I conducted alumni interviews for Yale applicants. It’s an easy gig. You take a smart, ambitious 17-year-old out for hot chocolate, ask them about their life, and then report back to the university, “Yup, this is another great kid.” 774 more words

“There was not the least sign of social disorder in 1942”

—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking at the 100 Years of Heroin Conference, Yale University, 1998… 1,210 more words

A few years ago, in New York for a conference, I made a pilgrimage to The Cloisters museum and gardens. I use the term “pilgrimage” advisedly. 1,409 more words

In 1916, one of the better-known fortune-tellers and magicians of Paris was sent to prison for fraud. The newspapers were peppered with details: his pseudonyms, some of his more bizarre practices, hints at his clientele. 1,081 more words

I’ve saved all the text messages my sister and I sent to each other this year.

I thought it would be comforting to be able to look at them when I’m sad and know that we connected when everything else got stripped away. 361 more words

Based on a true story.

*************

At the end of 8th grade year a new girl came to our school. By lunch time on her first day we all agreed she was the new “prettiest girl” in school. 1,379 more words

Our national epic has yet to be written – James Joyce

If you’ve ever listened to the song Running to Stand Still from U2’s Joshua Tree album you will have heard about the Irish town of Ballymun in the lyric “I see seven towers but I only see one way out.” Located on the northern periphery of Dublin city, Ballymun was at one time Ireland’s largest and – at least as much as my own experience has led me to hold – most unattractive public housing estate. 3,383 more words

A lot of us here when asked to talk about race are most comfortable, or least uncomfortable, talking about it in the language of scandal. It’s so satisfying, so clear, so easy.

Yesterday’s decision in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in what has been dubbed the ‘Europe vs Facebook’ case was, as the… 1,360 more words

Sometimes it feels like there’s a trembling child inside me, even though I see a bearded man staring back at me from the mirror these days. 784 more words

I’m fat. Technically, more accurately, I’m morbidly obese. But people don’t usually like technical, so I’m fat.

Being fat is hard in our society. Being fat and Mormon is even harder. 708 more words

I took a pregnancy test on the morning of May 14th, my husband’s birthday. I’d had a feeling about it and I thought it would be a nice surprise. 1,354 more words

Amnesty International’s recent decision to support the legalization of sex work is a controversial one. The group reasoned that because these individuals lived outside of a licit society, they were more vulnerable to physical abuse: “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse.” In order to bring these men and women out of the shadow economy and into the light, Amnesty International has supported the call for “consensual sex work” to be made legal in order that workers may be more legally protected from trafficking, violence, and exploitation. 893 more words

Dear Congress,

I write you today upon hearing the grave news that another heinous mass shooting has happened, this time in Roseburg, Oregon. We learned today that at least 10 people have lost their lives, and at least 7 have been injured. 958 more words

I can’t slaughter a goat but I can roast a leg of lamb.

Yael Malka/ Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

Last year, around this time, I was struggling. 696 more words