Francis Weller on Grief

“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned...

Speaking to Discomfort

Last Wednesday morning, I had an email in my inbox that was exactly what I needed. Tuesday, I had woken the reports of the leaked SCOTUS document about overturning Roe v. Wade. While it wasn’t exactly a surprise, it was still shocking and disheartening and deeply...

Liferafts and Sturdy Piers

Many years ago – another lifetime it sometimes seems – a friendship of more than a decade ended. Truthfully, it had been fading for some time by then. Still, it wasn’t me who pulled the plug when my friend took up with a married man. It was she who, underwhelmed with...

We’ll need this table by 7

My older siblings and I have a favorite memory of our paternal grandmother. Toward the end of her life, we all lived two hours from our grandmother’s mountaintop home. In our individual turns, we’d drive up and right at about an hour after arriving, our grandmother...

The Season of Both/And

Earlier this month, my nephew turned 22. I sent him a voice recording of me starting to sing Yellow Submarine, catching myself, then singing the five-second micro-Happy Birthday Song. A few hours later, he sent me a text saying he had been at work when he got my...

Dear Ms Rowling,

I wrote this a while back, a letter written for the purpose of processing my own feelings about JK Rowling’s tweet in December 2019 in which she used her mighty platform – her previously LGBQ-affirming platform – to express transphobic beliefs. I...

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