I am an old crone in training. The kind of enigmatic woman who is the subject of neighborhood gossip whispered behind guarded lips. I practice for the role with some late-night pacing. Contemplation has proven to be one of the most ineffective modes of transportation, though.
Tag: nonfiction
ESSAY | On Melodic Kinship: Lessons from Big Bird and the Banjo – Maia Rosenberg
As a child, I remember music in all sorts of languages from many disparate parts of the world were played in our living room. They were played in the living room because it was the best space for dancing. I distinctly remember someone remarking once on how fascinating it was to see “those kids” move in ways highly reminiscent of the cultural dances tied to the music being played in our green suburban house in our green Boulder suburb.
ESSAY | I Could Sing And The Whole World Could Be My Stage – Isaac Aju
I do not know whether to say that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie saved me or to ascribe it to God as we always do in Nigeria. When we studied so hard and passed an exam, we say it was God who did it…It is popular in Nigeria for Nigerian hospitals to display on their signboards: We take care, but only God heals.
ESSAY | I Have to Tell You – Laura Goncalves Ribeiro
When I arrive, you won’t be sitting at the kitchen granite table, where on rainy days we
shared pumpkin soup. I would not need to rehearse what to tell you at the granite table, with
no one around.
ESSAY | On the Decline – Sarah Davis
You’re on the decline, she said. I had come for a frozen shoulder. I didn’t even know that could happen. Apparently they just stop working, turn solid, you have to take your other arm, lift them up, plop them down and then they lay there useless. Right now one of my arm pits has deodorant on it, the other does not.
ESSAY | Eating Khichdi in Kenya – Farah Ahamed
Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday, 1st August, 1982
I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words ‘coup d’etat.’ That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots.
ESSAY | Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones – Sharon Kirsch
I am the daughter of a man with a TripTik. You may not know what a TripTik is, or you may understand it to be a triptych, a work of art made up of three panels, often hinged together in a sacred altarpiece.
ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien
The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.
ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm
Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.
ESSAY | Trying To See – Erin Ruble
On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
