Essays

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.

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…

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…

Although there is no singular defining reason why one experiences writing as meaningful or fulfilling, it surely grants us the unique chance to pry ourselves open on the page, bleed…

I cannot imagine what would have become of me or my story if I were not able to capture it in writing. My children and children’s children will be able…

Toby sometimes seems like an interruption, a reminder that I never can go back to who I’ve been before, making me fear that I’ll never finish these stories based on…