Publications
These are my memories, Becoming a Daughter, & Something lost
When I was three years old, she wore braces. After that, she used the tiny rubber bands to tie off her braid, one long snake of strands, a slender triune of dark hair to pass through my fingers. When I was twelve, she had a bicycle. It matched my father’s, but they never rode them.…
The Delicate Periphery of Your Crime
After you were indicted, the newspapers exploded. My mind flashes the burning imprint of your face above the fold, though more likely, you were an afterthought of a headline curled deep into the recesses of Section A and rolled into a tube on the door step of your home …
Writing Someone Else’s Story: Empathy and Entitlement in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Warrior”
While interviewing her for my memoir a few summers ago, my grandma told me, “Do what you will aft er I die, but don’t tell that story while I’m still around,” and like a good granddaughter I told her I wouldn’t write about it, knowing full well that the story she didn’t want me to…
Pleiades
I want to get up from this table and get a glass of water. I want to brush my teeth, then my hair, braid it, pull it back into a bun. I want to put on a linen shift and walk along the Gulf Coast from Bolivar Island to Matagorda Bay. I don’t care that…
On the Influence of Mentors
I’ve always wanted a mentor, but I’ve never had one, not like Socrates was to Plato or Emerson to Thoreau. This can mean one of two things. Either my work appalls and repels or (because I can’t bear to believe I can’t write) I plain don’t need a mentor. I don’t mean to sound flippant…
The Forest
She is the hag of fairy tales, the woman with the hunched back and the craning neck, and she lives in a flagstone cottage in the forest’s belly. She has wet, black eyes and covers her wrinkles in stitched burlap not quilted, grim rags. And in your dreams you find her as though you are…