Today is the last entry from my 50 Stories in 50 Weeks project. One year ago, I turned fifty and ended a fifteen year career in advertising. I’d left so I could focus on my writing, and this little project was a first step. Then a global pandemic hit, everything shut down, and these weekly…
I have this memory of making chocolate chip cookies with my mother. Or rather, I’m sneaking spoonfuls of raw cookie dough and shoveling it in my mouth when she’s not looking. Isn’t that what every kid does? I hate the way memories work, though. We believe that something happened, maybe once or repeatedly. This could…
I’d had this idea to write stories about all the wonderful women and friendships in my life. It started out well but as this 50 Stories, 50 Weeks project went on and I started grad school, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do everyone justice in the next few weeks. So I’m…
Read more 50 Stories, Week 48: To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before, Part 3
I’ve been practicing yoga now for thirty years and while I have some level of muscle memory, I still have a beginner’s mindset. As a child, I remember watching tv while bending myself into a pretzel. I often wanted to show my parents how I could put my legs over my shoulders and balance on…
When I was pregnant with Jackson, I was clueless. Yes, I knew more about what was happening physiologically in my body than most 27-year-olds, but as far as parenting was concerned, I didn’t know diddly squat. Just because we were once children, had parents, or that women have been giving birth for millions of years,…
When you are the last of five children with a Catholic family background, chances are you’re going to have a lot of nieces and nephews. I have nine, plus six greats ages two to 12. I was only 11 myself when I first became an auntie so many of them feel more like friends, and…
I miss traveling. Clearly, it’s a privilege, both to have traveled and to be missing it. Still, cabin fever has me reminiscing about places I’ve been and more specifically, some of the misadventures I’ve had. Usually these happened because I did the one thing I try not to do while traveling – have expectations. There…
When I was eight years old, I fell face first off a swing on the school playground. What I remember most about this incident was not the pain of picking gravel out of my face, after having scraped it against the rocky dirt below. Nor the embarrassment of having to be carried to the nurse’s…
A short, short story. Today I finished my first MFA Writing residency – ten days of intense learning and workshopping before jumping into the first term. Then we do this all over again four more times. Words used regularly that I had to google for definition: Ekphrastic, Perspicacity, Magical Realism, Peripatetic, Belies, Frowsy, Obsequiousness, Autofiction,…
It has been one full year since I shaved my head. Clearly I was prescient in knowing that the whole world was about to implode so I thought I’d make a drastic move in anticipation. Over the summer, about six months in, I still had people asking me But WHY? Why did you do it?…
Failing better. 