My Personal Creative Nonfiction
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Memory of Payton in Four Fragments
I. Bull’s Eye Aunt Dinny and Mother walked ahead, their white shirts lit by the evening sun, with Cousin Payton and me behind them. He and I walked side-by-side because Aunt Dinny said Payton and I should be friends. The dirt road behind my grandmother’s house was straight, running east to west, with woods on Continue reading
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Perfectionism: A Coin Toss
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2000, Martha Stewart described herself as a “maniacal perfectionist.” You remember Martha Stewart, right? A woman whose career has spanned six decades. A woman who turned a Connecticut-based catering business into a billion-dollar corporation. Someone who has cultivated publicity-provoking friendships with a wide cast of famous characters: Donald Continue reading
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Martha Redux
David and I spend most of our evenings together in our new home. A pair of later-life newlyweds, we devote the time to bringing our two, already-full lives together and merging them into one new shared life. At the end of each day, we come together for bits of conversation, the luxury of comfortable silences, Continue reading
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Caroline Kirkland: My Pioneer Sister?
Mudholes complicated travel on the frontier beyond Detroit. In 1836, in a wagon loaded with household goods and six children, Caroline Kirkland and her husband William lumbered toward the tract of land they had purchased on speculation. They planned to make a new home, and hopefully a handsome profit, in the West. They had already Continue reading
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Who Would I Encounter in a Psychomanteum?
I sit on a low chair in a small, dimly lit room. A candle burns behind me. In front of me stands a long rectangular mirror. I am seated at an angle to the mirror so that I don’t see my own image. As I’ve been instructed to do, I think about family members who Continue reading
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Quicksand
Miss Bell tells me to stand up. She’s the first-grade Sunday school teacher at Tuckahoe Presbyterian. She says she’s sending me to Mrs. Platt’s office. Mrs. Platt is the education director, the closest thing the church has to a school principal. I am six years old, and I am in trouble for lying. Every Sunday, Continue reading
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
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