Memoir
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Food Memories: Prose Poems with Homemade Images

1 According to one of our family legends, one winter during the Depression my maternal grandmother fed her nine children nothing but turnips. One of her uncles, a farmer, gave them to her, fearing that otherwise her family would starve. He’d grown them to feed to his pigs. As adults, all of her children vowed… Continue reading
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Send Me the Bill

I. What I Remember We were in a hurry. Mother always walked fast, but I struggled more than usual to keep up with her as we sped through the train station with her suitcase. She held my hand and dragged me along behind her, her oversized purse swinging from her shoulder, clunking into my head… Continue reading
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On Teaching, Imposter Syndrome, and the Hazards of Homonyms

“I am a liar,” Tony said in my English composition class. To prepare for a writing assignment, I was leading my students in a discussion of identity markers: race, gender, socioeconomic status. As usual during our class sessions, Tony had been sitting slumped in his seat, arms folded over his chest, staring at me, smirking.… Continue reading
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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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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
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?
If so, this blog is for you.
