by Traci Brimhall | Dec 2, 2019
One of my wrists is tattooed with a fat iamb, which my son calls a moon and a tear and wants to know what makes the waxing moon have such sadness, so I tell him it’s a heartbeat and put his tiny fingers to the pulse flutter there, and he wonders why I have a heart in...
by Lee Ware | Nov 22, 2019
Not long ago, I wrote an essay reflecting on the many forms delusions can take that included some snippets from my childhood that I’d more or less suppressed for years. When I shared the essay with some other writers, I knew they would tell me that it...
by Walker Thomas | Nov 1, 2019
When I came home from summer camp in the Poconos in 1958, Knutt showed me a pair of turtles he’d caught in Queen Anne Creek. Silver-dollar-size painted terrapins basked on sunlit mats of watercress that grew against Queen Anne’s banks like barrier reefs...
by Emily Lackey | Apr 4, 2019
We make the best of what we’ve got. Two tents, a flat piece of land, a nylon hammock that packs down to nearly nothing. We stuff the cooler with ice, but the week-long heat wave stretching across Vermont means we’re careful about opening it too often. One too...
by Jo Anne Bennett | Mar 18, 2019
In Ghana, I was warned, all snakes are poisonous. All ninety-two species. If you are bitten, you have to grab the snake and take it along to the hospital so they can give you the correct antivenin. Assuming they have antivenin. And assuming there’s a hospital. When I...
by Daniel M. Jaffe | Mar 12, 2019
These past few months, I’ve taken great amusement in others’ reactions to my newly bushy beard, and in their questioning why I’ve chosen to let it grow so full and long now that I’ve turned 60 and my beard has turned white. For most of the past 40 years, I’ve...