Essays

I’d read all the pregnancy books, humorous and practical alike, but none of them really prepared me for that moment. Instead, it was the desolate landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction—which…

Parenting a child with early Alzheimer’s-like symptoms leaves little energy for anything else, I discovered, so I shifted my priority from recreating what had been, to nurturing what could be.…

My plays are colored by motherhood. My poetry, a fairly recent undertaking, comes back to themes of mothering again and again. My two girls were with me throughout the entirety…

Rather than force a return to the poems I was working on, I needed to write differently. I needed to intentionally mark the rupture between past and present, before becoming…

The travelers were much younger than I am now, from different countries, and different time periods, but they had all arrived at a turning point in their lives and needed…

I used to be precious about my writing time. Everything needed to be just so before I could start laying one word after another. My sacred place had to be…

That pretentious girl, who rolled her eyes at her mom’s Danielle Steele novels, would have scoffed at the mom I’ve become, engaged in a heated debate with my kids about…

I felt like I couldn’t be the writer I wanted to be. And I wasn’t the mother I wanted to be. So what was I? Nothing of any value. A…

What does it mean when a female writer cannot share and describe what could very likely have been one of the most transformative experiences of her life?

A writer needs a writing nook. A space that is the perfect combination of inspiration and (dis)comfort. My nook started out in a perfectly nook-appropriate place in our home: the…

Arthur said, “You shouldn’t use that word.” I had had no idea that he was looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. I confronted the word “ass” plainly in…