July 28, 2016
What Can’t Be Cast Off: An Interview with Fiction Writer Rachel Hall
In many of my columns for the Kenyon Review blog, I’ve been exploring what we hold onto and what holds onto us. What do we try to discard? What haunts […]
July 12, 2016
Temporary Talismans
There’s a postcard I’ve kept propped on my desk, on a bookshelf, or protected in a drawer—since middle school. I don’t know what attracted me to that particular postcard from […]
June 30, 2016
Most People Are Not Your Friends
In the fifth grade, I was friends with a girl on my street. Best friends—though we did not wear those Be Fri / St Ends necklaces—a heart split in two—each […]
June 13, 2016
Six Hours From Anywhere You Want to Be
Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, and the Southern Tier all hang onto the moniker of the Northeast by their fingernails. In my short story, “The Half King,” I describe Western New York as “disturbingly […]
May 30, 2016
The Books We Keep: Part Two
Getting married ushered in a new stage of dealing with things—beginning with registry gifts. Though I had declared I was not going to change—I was still the same person, same […]
May 16, 2016
The Books I Kept: Part One
When I was growing up in Rochester, NY, in the 1980s, you could drive to Monroe Avenue on the east side of the city and spend the afternoon wandering between […]
May 13, 2016
Aloha, Mother
Toni Morrison, in her essay “The Site of Memory,” writes: All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like […]
April 17, 2016
Trauma Privilege
It was November 8, 2015, at 11:09 p.m. I know because I took a screenshot. In a Facebook group I moderate of over 200 local writers, a woman addressed a […]
April 1, 2016
No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary
Whenever my brother and I have talked about depression or therapy, which have both been part of my life for over half of it, he will bring up the film […]
March 22, 2016
Every Night Is Ladies Night: An Interview with Sonja Livingston
On a recent flight from Boston back to Buffalo, my seatmate claimed both armrests, and never once looked up nor adjusted his position when I pressed past him to my […]
March 2, 2016
Ghazals for James Foley
Last week, I received my copy of Ghazals for Foley in the mail. James Foley was an American journalist and my classmate in the MFA program in fiction at UMass Amherst. Jim’s […]
February 24, 2016
You Have to Like It Better Than Being Loved
Last week, I had a run in with a family friend at the gym—a collision that frustrated me and left me reaching for a poem by Marge Piercy I first […]