Kristine Langley Mahler bookends her debut essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts, with images of her adolescent self keeping vigil over a suburban neighborhood in Greenville, North Carolina. On the busiest street in the subdivision, where her family lived for four years, Mahler spent hours on her front porch, hidden from view by the overhanging roofline. […]
Who Lives in that House Photo by Thomas Bennie Can it fairly be called a game? We point toward any number of homes along a series of bayous as we navigate our urban core, repeating the same question over and over. There are no rules. There is no prize. Nor are there right or wrong […]
Liminal. The word comes to mind so often while I am spelunking through Lauren Haldeman’s graphic memoir Team Photograph that I feel compelled to look it up. “Occupying both sides of a boundary,” or “relating to a transition.” Ambiguity. Disorientation. Yes to all of these. In Team Photograph, Haldeman layers three points in time—distant past, […]
The Laundry Photo by Emily Chung What was it like,” my partner asks, “growing up as you did?”—and I can only think to tell her about the laundry. So much for a family of three, it seemed. There was a chute in the closet beside my room, which made me think of the game […]
Even as a five-year-old, Elissa Bassist hated the sound of her own voice. She memorized the lyrics to each song in the 1989 Disney classic The Little Mermaid—about a teenage fish-princess who signs away her best-in-the-world voice for long legs to pursue a boy—especially the banger “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” in which the octopus sing-splains how […]
The prolific French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux opens Simple Passion—a slim autobiographical novel narrating her passionate and doomed affair with a married Russian diplomat temporarily stationed in Paris—with a description of her protagonist watching pornography. She searches at first for a comprehensible narrative to the film, some evidence of causality to the actions being […]
Self-Storage Photo By Joel Swick [The Bowl that Fills] I can’t conjure my own first memory, but I do remember Virginia Woolf’s. She was in the nursery at St. Ives in the Hebrides. The acorn on the end of the string from a window blind slid back and forth across the floor with the […]
In Possums Run Amok, teenager Lora Lafayette hitchhikes to destinations unknown, striving to quench her thirst to explore the unknown. Eventually she and her friend Kay journey across the ocean from their hometown of Portland, Oregon to experience European cultures whilst embracing an edgy, punk-rock, anarchist lifestyle during the late 1970s. In this “true tale […]
A Latin phrase is included in the Great Seal of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” meaning, “Out of many, one.” This is etched into the fabric of the American story. In Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Native Nations’ first United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, indeed makes out of many, one. In her second memoir, […]
In 2006, Donald Antrim was on the roof of his apartment building, close to suicide. “I was not on the roof to jump,” he clarifies, “I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. . . I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I […]