Christy Tending’s High Priestess of the Apocalypse: A Memoir of Disobedience brings together thirty-nine short essays on climate grief, environmental activism, and becoming a parent in fraught times. These pieces, presented in a variety of formats, range from lyrical to instructive, from reminiscent to angry. Central themes of political protest and organizing carry us on […]
Don’t read Christopher Izant’s memoir if you’re looking for answers. The author served as a marine combat advisor for a unit of the Afghan Border Police, and in the wake of Kabul’s disastrous fall in 2021, everyone has the same question: Was it worth it? “I hate that question,” Izant writes. “Most days, I just […]
In The Body Alone, Nina Lohman doesn’t shrink from the conundrum inherent in writing a memoir of chronic pain: “I need more words because none of these do the work I need them to,” she tells us. “Nothing, it seems, not my brightest words, not your sincerest empathy, communicates my inner world to your outer […]
“Ostensibly I write novels and stories,” Danielle Dutton writes at the start of “A Picture Held Us Captive,” the long essay on ekphrastic writing that makes up the third section, “Art,” of her book Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, “yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is […]
Long ago, my mother lost her French, and with it all memory of her upbringing in Franco-American Lewiston, Maine. This was why we had come to Maine that summer—not so much to capture a frisson of lost language but to recover memories, as if to grasp them like so much detritus sprayed upon the shore. […]
To read Paul Lindholdt’s Interrogating Travel is to receive a wellspring of lived experience about traveling the land and seas of planet Earth: this blue marble floating in space, our “home globe.” Having passed the critical carbon marker point of 4.24 ppm in May of 2023, we find it increasingly difficult to remain optimistic about […]
Kristine Langley Mahler, a married, thirty-eight year old mother of daughters, has reached a point of reckoning. She has worked as an administrative assistant at a university though her young adulthood, a job she describes as “golden handcuffs of half-time job with benefits.” Now it’s time for change. This lyrical memoir chronicles her journey. Kristine […]
Losing a child. As you read those words, do you have a visceral reaction? A tightening of the belly? A gasp? One does not have to be a parent to feel the fear, the pain. One just has to be human. Children die—of illness, accidents, violence—but when a child dies of suicide, as did Eileen […]
Emily Strasser’s Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History is a book for our time. In an age when intergenerational trauma is being explored and researched, Strasser is providing us with important work in this genre. In this meticulously researched book, she plunges into the world of her grandfather George. He died long […]
In 2004 I hitchhiked illegally into western Tibet, passing myself off as an Uyghur who had misplaced her identity papers. I got arrested twice, made a daring escape over a frozen mountain, pushed trucks through waterlogged valleys, and got a smashing case of near-fatal pneumonia. I also lost all my underwear (long story) and got […]