Creative Nonfiction

We had badly pitched an old tent, and after whispering scary stories, the children faded into sleep. I lay awake, listening carefully to one child’s quiet wheezing, the flapping tarp,…

One night after bedtime stories, I lie next to my son and watch his eyes grow cloudy with the haze of sleep. He looks younger this way — not four years old,…

Nina was six at her first recital. A butterfly of a girl with expressive eyes, a quick mind, and dancing feet, she was fond of red glitter shoes and clashing…

Even over a year after the trip to the zoo, I still thought about that baboon. Staring at my phone, after a few scrolls, the dark image of the baboon…

But look: Here he is, wearing this hat that he thought, all on his own, to go out and buy. Relief floats through me, and I sense my tightly coiled…

I took the Metro to work, looking at the other young women commuters, and wondering which of them was also among the one in four. Were any of them also…

Tonight, when I slip between my own sheets, I know that we will be the same, Kate and I—each of us held beneath the weight of our fears, the things…

My mother had never been late for a concert. Preparations for each 7:30 performance began in the morning when she would hang her white “band” shirt like a basket of…

For so long, it’s been just us, my daughter and me, connected in a deep and frightening way I never anticipated when I adopted her, becoming a single parent.

I push myself away from the door and decide to load the dishwasher. Cup, cup, bowl, plate, bowl, knife, fork. Within three minutes, the cups and plates are at jaunty…

She was born a stranger with purple wrinkly hands on a hot, August night. It’s hard to believe now, on this cool March evening, that I haven’t always known her.…