Literary Reflections

I jog and write. Feet find road, fingers ping keys. I don’t lose weight. Essays are left in pieces. Chapters are only ideas. I had hoped that by now my resolutions would be paying off.

I was perhaps the exact readership that Judy Blume had in mind when she wrote Are You There, God? I was a girl with very little information about sexuality.

I still don’t remember what it is. I know the feeling though. I feel its emptiness like black tar.

Seeing my dead daughter become a publicly recognized name was unexpected in my self-focused grief and my naïve eagerness to share what a writer and human being Victoria was, and I have mixed feelings about it.

I have learned to value those things—the jugs and the kettles, the infant sunscreen.

My anxiety is high as I wait for my school district to decide about fall. I wait even though I have already decided my kids will not go back in person.

It was the moment my daughter refused to collude, wanting instead to strike out on her own, no matter what the consequences.

I write not for the people I love or for any abstract public or judge, but for myself

For the first time in my life, I was not looking outside of myself for validation. I wasn’t troubled by anyone else’s opinion about who I was, or what I…

There can never be too much laughter in your life, so increase the dosage with some humorous reading. We’ve picked our favorite chuckle-makers for this month’s Essential Reading. Get ready…

It took months of distance to give myself permission to shape the experience into words. To own the right to my story—the story of my ordinary heart, scarred from decades-old…