Little is known about the history of fog. But it is water—billions of microscopic droplets suspended above the earth—and it comes eight ways. Hovering close to the ground, it is the most common, radiation fog. Floating above the lowest points in Appalachia, it is valley fog. Fog drawn inland from the Pacific, or the San …
I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s work at the onset of that long fever known as adolescence. We didn’t have smartphones back then to rescue us from the twin plagues of doubt and boredom. So we walked around with ancient devices tucked into our back pockets. These devices had only one app. You opened them and scanned …
Liveaboards In my new island life, I am a woman on the beach, all wrapped against the wind. It is not sunny. I am no longer young. The skies are gray; perhaps it is misting or has misted or will mist. I am not old. The water is choppy, little whitecaps rolling in like glimpses …
1 I ask them what they think about. Truly, whatever’s on your mind. Write it down. Anonymously. The mundane. The trivial. The serious. The sublime. Work, one writes. Sleep. Dexter. My best friend’s cystic fibrosis. Stress, says another. Responsibility. Israel. Career. Money, another says. Sandwiches. Parties. Girlfriends. Being an asshole, someone writes, and following, in …
Americana While my son and I build with blocks in the playroom, YouTube becomes our jukebox, time machine, history lesson, giving us Jean Ritchie, Odetta, songs its autoplay chooses, Vera Hall singing about a man who runs, a man in chains, a man who gets killed. Boil Vera worked as a cook and washerwoman in …
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough. —Robin Wall Kimmerer Every year around this time, a small frog shows up in my mother’s garden. A Pacific tree frog, also known as a “chorus frog,” with a bright-green body iridescent against sprigs of wild lilac or browned petals of …
Joining a yoga studio forced me to think about breathing. I’m conflicted as I kneel on my mat waiting for class to begin. Despite breathing being essential to staying alive, I’ve always worried about bad breath. Worse is the worry of losing your breath entirely and not being able to draw it back. The worst …
Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: In “Specs,” Ismael Rodriguez gives us a powerful and compassionate essay about family, inheritance, and the fragile, imperfect bond between father and son. He examines the weaknesses and shortcomings of family—especially fathers—and how they shape the narrator, as these things shape us all. Rich with vivid details of character and …
Imperative: “A grammatical mood that forms commands or requests, including the giving of prohibition or permission.” —The Logical Language Group Remember when you realize that you have fallen in love. It is not supposed to happen to you, a woman trying to become a nun. Renunciation. Not so much of the world in general but …