In Graceland, At Last, Margaret Renkl makes the stereotypes of her native country her business. Taken from her weekly op-ed column in the New York Times, these essays emanate from Renkl outwards—from her own garden where hawks drink at her birdbath to a wildlife reserve in Tennessee helping reestablish the eagle population, from her son’s […]
My father will spin his life into a series of anecdotes and stage-friendly one-liners. It’s a magician’s trick. First comes a sudden sparkle in the periphery, an old pickpocket move, though he uses it to protect his own pockets. Over there, he’ll point, and in a wink you’ll laugh and look away.
Central to Elizabeth Kadetsky’s stellar collection of essays about the nature of memory and grief, The Memory Eaters is her mother’s slippage from a world that once defined the parameters of her identity, and her own capacity to navigate it, as a result of Alzheimer’s disease. As Kadetsky grieves, memories from her girlhood and young […]
When Krys Malcolm Belc became pregnant with a son, he began to see his identity—not only as transmasculine, but as a parent, partner, and child—reshaping around the fetus growing inside him. Belc’s memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, considers the fluidity between a body in relation to others, as […]
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first essay collection, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, stands with one foot in nature writing and the other in memoir. Widely known for her poetry, Nezhukumatathil uses clean, playful prose to guide us through interesting anecdotes about nature and morsels of memoir about growing up as […]
Get Thee to a Bakery opens with the title essay, in which Rick Bailey recounts his somewhat misguided attempt to clean the gutters in flip-flops—much to the consternation of his wife. While perilously perched at the edge of his ladder, Bailey ponders others who have fallen off ladders. He imagines himself “falling to the ground […]
With a title like Shook and a subtitle that includes both the words earthquake and deadliest, you might think that Jennifer Hull’s recent book is simply a page turner, a book to consume but not one to carry. And you would be both right and wrong. Her book, one centering on the figure of Dave […]
Braiding Sweetgrass is a call to action that combines memoir, Indigenous storytelling, and scientific writing. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, examines the relationships people have with the land from a traditional and scientific view, prompting us to do the same.
As we share the same codified language predilections, we share the same thoughts and perceptions. The Queen’s English is the enemy of the nonnormative.
It is this kind of brokenness that Sinor seems to be talking about: not a brokenness beyond repair, or even necessarily to be repaired, but the brokenness that we all live with, every day.