Essays

I wrote about my mother growing up without a father and the ways this led her to reach for food for comfort. I wrote about the bright red nail polish…

I was staring at her in awe, trying to figure out how she possibly managed, when one of her free-range kids knocked another into a salad dressing display and several…

Writing is all about response. Robert Frost once said that he lived life twice: once when he experienced it and a second time when he wrote about it. By writing…

I have savored his precocious malapropisms, confusing “eclectic” for “electric,” “cousin” for “cuisine,” and once, when I told him how handsome he looked, he said, “good enough to be on…

With that steadfast look he sometimes gives me, it’s as if he suspects that once he and his younger brother are secure in the church daycare room, with their free…

Hemingway once said he could write 91 pages of shit before getting one page of a masterpiece. (Masterpiece, Papa? Clearly you had little self-doubt.) This is reassuring except for one…

Dear Virginia [comma, space, enter, I write] Regarding the issue of being a woman writer, [pause, fingers poised over keyboard] I am so screwed. [Appropriateness of using profanity with dead…

I call him “The Jason” because he’s a lot like “The Donald” — minus the comb-over. “The Jason” cut his first deal at age 13, when he sold naming rights…

As I pushed the stroller into the community center, damp circles of sweat bloomed under my arms. I took a quick sniff check and prayed for good ventilation at the…

Sit anyone down for a free association starting with the word “mother,” and you’ll probably get some pretty sunny words. Love. Muffins. Involvement. Nurture. Meatloaf. Self-Sacrifice. Start with the word…

I am a secret novelist. Playwright, too. Short stories. Tens of thousands of words are sitting on my computer, in my notebooks. They see light sometimes in my writing group,…