Profiles

I do tend to mythologize childhood, as a terrain to visit in search of understanding. I think this comes from my obsession with time. I want to arrest time, to…

Andrea J. Buchanan’s 2018 memoir, The Beginning of Everything, explores Buchanan’s battle with an incapacitating cerebrospinal fluid leak. It tells of the painful period where she searched for answers in…

While recently reading some of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, I uncovered some beautiful and ambivalent reflections on her family life. As a mother and new grandmother, I found that…

Cati Porter is a poet, editor, essayist, and arts administrator who hails from Southern California. She is the author of five chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry.

One thing I’ve learned in writing memoir is that no matter what, someone will take issue with you. That’s just something you have to accept. For me, it’s been imperative…

Motherhood put me even more in touch with my sensory experience, with ordinary mysteries all around us, and it gave me a foil for my experience as an only child…

Gender is indeed a social construct; women and nonbinary people are its ultimate scapegoat. All our lives, we have to run against a shadow larger than ours, a shadow of…

When I was pregnant with my first child, I searched high and low for a place online that served my community in a way that didn’t leave us as the…

I think it’s important for writers, especially new writers, to understand that everyone’s first novel was written under impossible circumstances. Most people are writing their first novel around the edges…

Both parents have to be willing to start over, to treat co-parenting as a new, separate relationship—not a new battleground to keep rehashing the past or punishing the other parent.…

Then, when my sons were in the NICU, I had a lightning-bolt moment. Life was short and unpredictable. I couldn’t just sit around and think about how someday I’d write…