THE TRIAL

"It's not funny," my husband said after staring at the cartoon above.   There is a nasty rumor I found on the Facebook page of someone trying to friend me. It claims Ford's father was a CIA assassin. Seriously? This should be reported to Mulder immediately. And Scully. Today, I wanted to turn away from …

VIOLATION

  The rape scene is explicit. I taught The Bluest Eye for 25 years. It is an extraordinary novel told from multiple perspectives. A little girl is ruined, driven insane and lost. The language is stunning, beautiful, masterful. I introduced the novel with an early event where a narrator describes being sick and feeling her …

PARING DOWN and going out

In our continuing effort to tidy the house, I am following an online series of articles on how to edit and tidy my home. Fifteen days of advice on how to eliminate clutter, and basically sort "stuff" into giveaway, toss, and keep-but-put-away. The process began by suggesting that I have a "monster pile" someplace in …

HONORING ERROR

When I was in high school, we told a joke: This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life you would have been told where to go and what to do.  We can choose what we do with ourselves and we can choose to seek meaning. But we …

THE WORDS I WANT

Most days I find glass during my walk on the beach, but I always find agates. Rarely I will pick up a feather. I lean down slowly, sliding my hand down my thigh, and even so my head throbs when I pluck a treasure from the sand. Ten days ago I suffered a concussion in …

CROWS STORY

I have a brief creative nonfiction essay in issue 59 of Dinty Moore's Brevity. All the work there is nonfiction and very short (under 750 words). My true story, "A Murder of Crows," recounts an event from some years ago at a local summer camp. This journal's website has been a valuable resource for my …

HELP, I’VE FALLEN BUT I GOT BACK UP

I fell hard yesterday. I was doing something stupid, trotting backwards as I tried to photograph my husband and a seastack and he kept walking right out of my frame. (If he knows he's being photographed, he mugs or frowns. Photos of Gary smiling are pretty rare.) So I was backing up to keep Gary …

PURSUIT OF FLYING

Linking to an article about "lawnmower parents" triggered an interesting discussion on my Facebook page. Some were defensive about "rescuing" or failing to "rescue" children. Others pointed out that some children genuinely need more guidance than others due to disabilities and disadvantages that may not even be visible. As a private and public school teacher, …

USE YOUR WORDS

Last year a student argued that black people were not being unfairly targeted by police because unarmed white people had been killed by police too. Entirely absent from the student's research was some simple math which would have revealed, that yes, it's true Whites as well as Blacks are killed, but black people are disproportionately …