As I sit on our backyard deck, I hear a rhythmic flopping noise coming from the church road that runs parallel to our property. There—a scruffy ...
Category Writing – Non Fiction
This Hand I Hold
I am fixated on the memory of his hands. I can picture him lighting his pipe. The pipe in his left hand, the Zippo lighter in his right. The ...
Origin Stories
Leave your orange flight suit, the one you wore testing how low and fast you could fly above the trees. Leave your leather bomber jacket with ...
Tick-tock
“There are still around 16,000 nuclear weapons on the planet—most of them much more destructive than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...
Photograph (1974)
I am thirteen, wearing my brother’s long denim shirt with the pearly snaps over my gymnastics leotard, and my red elephant bell-bottom pants with ...
Sometimes we break glass
The first time I grieved was for comedian Freddie Prinze. It was around the time of the ‘77 blizzard and outside my suburban Ohio home, the yards ...
For the Class of 2016
Since it is unlikely that I will be invited back to my alma mater to give the commencement address, I decided that I will write my own. In three ...
All the Things You Want
I want to write the other thing. The thing I’m afraid to write. The thing that has monsters and secrets where doors slam shut. The thing that ...
The Most Interesting Cat in the World
I spent most of this morning alternating between feeding him small plates of canned salmon, and picking him up, cuddling him, whispering that I ...
You Were Once Wild Here
When I drive down Route 229, down the hill and into the valley, cows on the left, flattened cornfield on the right, sycamore trees like ghosts ...
Thick Glass
Writing feels like concrete, wet and sloppy when it is poured, still malleable as it settles to fill corners, then turning into an immutable ...
An Abundance of Cats
“You know, you have real, live cats,” my husband says. I know this. I also know that I’m not allowed to have any more cats. Four is the limit, ...