Shabbat Shalom! I want to take some time before Shabbat begins to share something for Bandit. I start this attempt knowing full well that any words I try to set to him will feel utterly incomplete. Bandit was a once in a lifetime, soulmate kind of dog. My little soul-pup. When I met Bandit during …
Each Thursday I will be pulling something from my personal writing archives to share until the archives run out! Buckle in for some poetry, short stories, personal essays, and book reviews! I thought that I would start with one of my favorite genres, personal nonfiction. I wrote this piece while studying abroad in London in …
A snow blizzards outside my window and I pull up my blind to watch the frantic flakes. It is the middle of the night or the earliest hours of the morning and I have been crying instead of sleeping. Between the sobs, I find myself utterly awake, eyes sore and mind needing a task to …
Today, the first day of Black History Month, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIH) published an essential historiography by Stephen G. Hall tracing the roots of this celebratory month. “History as a Communal Act: The Creation of Black History Month” starts with a speech given in the early 19th century and ends with the communal digital projects …
Snack cakes come packaged in twos. In 8th grade, my dad would drive me to and from school on his three weeks off. Working on the North Slope in Alaska, his schedule has fluctuated over the years, but back then he was three weeks on the slope and three weeks off at home. In the …
I don’t usually like to preface my writing with explanation or apologies, a habit I learned from Hollins where my work was expected to stand alone and endure critique with an author’s closed mouth, but this poem, being the first for the blog and a rather personal one, warrants an introduction. I am allergic to …
It was the twilight of summer, several years ago, before my Grandpa Wally or Grandma Betty had passed, perhaps even before I graduated from Hollins. I was in the crawl space, underneath their home on the lake in Nebraska, changing out an air filter with my father. The entrance to the crawl space, or cellar as …
To be honest, the idea of immediate and public communication has always fallen from my brain like bowling ball– the large lump squeezing through my throat before plummeting my gut to my feet. I am the ghost the internet warned you about, but it isn’t like you can blame me. Surely you too have felt …
