Originally posted on Monica Lee:
One way to judge a good memoir is by its first chapter. At a memoir writing workshop I attended before writing “The Percussionist’s Wife,” author Paulette Bates Alden (“Crossing the Moon”) maintained the first chapter was a reflection of all that was to follow. “The first chapter is like a…

The snap of Thanos has become a pop culture analogy for sudden and drastic change. Occupy Wall street was a moment when those who held supposed middle-class positions – lawyers, professors, middle-managers – discovered their exploitation. A fizzure occurred within their self-image that had been built on a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” as bell hooks so clearly…

A dedication to letters, words, sounds, silence and reading; interwoven with ancient history and what we still have to learn from it.   Source: On Writing: An Abecedarian

My fetal memories, my introduction to language, my first physical relationship to the Earth’s magnetic pull, the air I first screamed to inhale, the food I tasted through my mother’s lactation, the sounds, scents, climate that first touched me was across an ocean from where I am now. It may not mean much, except that…

This strange time is making us consider mortality, yes in some very real ways but also to face that shadow, the strangeness, the unknown, to confront our feelings about death and dying. At what age were you introduced to the concept of dying? Did it come from the death of a pet, the death of…

Originally posted on collective failure:
When a person wins an award it is all celebration, publicity, and inscriptions in the record-books. Now we face the flood of “revelations” that many recipients of such awards do not deserve the honor. So a small article is typed out to state that the award, distinction, title or honor has…

one of my favorite poets; we all need more poetry [up from slobbery] BY HARRYETTE MULLEN up from slobbery hip hyperbole the soles of black feet beat down back streets a Yankee porkchop for your knife and fork your fill of freedom in Philmeyork never trouble rupture urban space fluctuates gentrify the infrastructure feel up…