Columns

No one is guaranteed a second summer on this earth. I could try to bury this thought in the back of my mind, but I like to keep it right…

“Kenna hora,” my mother used to say, a Yiddish phrase that, to the best of my understanding, asks the evil eye to look away. She’d attach it to any mention…

I catch grace when I stop contemplating the stupid thing I said to a friend last week or even what I’m going to write in this very column later. I…

Ethan is in college two hundred miles away. We speak on the phone an average of twice a week. In the absence of my one child from my day-to-day life,…

As my boy grew into adolescence, I felt my old longing for a fuller table, this time on his behalf. I wanted Ethan to be at the hub of good…

To me, the purest form of creative expression would look just like that: Not performed for approval, but done to articulate oneself in a new, larger way. I would like…

The great lie, here, is that in ”having it all,” we have sacrificed nothing. In reality, we’ve sacrificed the act of choice itself. Instead of weighing our options and determining…

Ten years ago, when I was still working as a librarian, I had a memorable lunch with a colleague. She was older than I, close to retirement age, and her…

This is my last “Birthing the Mother Writer” column for Literary Mama, and so it is a way of saying goodbye to all the readers and reader-writers and editors and…

“You know people plan these things a full year in advance,” a good friend of mine pointed out. Her calendar was filling up with work and family commitments. She found…

In our last class before summer break, we explored creative nonfiction as a spectrum that incorporates elements of poetry, fiction, and various nonfiction strategies such as research, journalism, memoir, and…