Essays

 We’d arrived at the ER just after midnight, January 5, 2016—ironically, Mom’s eighty-first birthday.  

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In late winter, 2020, I—and the world—learned that V is for virus. Shapeless, unable to be seen, heard ... 

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I was a late bloomer, learning to ride a bike. While most kids learn by kindergarten ... 

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The mane streams behind the dog as it tears across gray floorboards.

“Frickin’ lion.”  

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My brother Sean and I had a routine the summer we spent in hospital waiting rooms. He’d pull ...

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I was at the final winery I’d be visiting in the Chianti region, seated at a long farm table with ... 

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A breeze swept off the water and into the car’s window as we crossed the Tobin Bridge toward home. 

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My mother announces on a mild June afternoon, a Sunday, that she wants her birdbath moved. 

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The revolving door into 75 Francis Street, one of three entrances into Boston’s Brigham and Women’s ... 

I hiccupped and slid into the booth beside Shelly. Wiggled out of my down coat. It was March, slushy ...

You were there, not conscious but in body, when they draped you, intubated and hooked you to a ventilator  ...  

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My mother was in the room with me, morning to evening, in the weeks following my open-head surgery.   

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Sunshine streams from a cloudless sky through leafless maple branches, winter white bright  ...   

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I’ve felt the pull for years, to see what’s out there, how it differs from what I understand of the world ...

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Our neighborhood has a sidewalk chalk artist, and I think she’s a girl.  Twelve, maybe thirteen ...

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Dispatch, from a May morning. The birds don’t know. They didn’t get the memo. Their songs outside my ...  

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It snuck up on us, most of us. We see this now. Outside of a handful of specialists ...

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It’s the news, it must be the news. Why else would I dream something so horrific?   

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The buildings flow as one attached with lumber and nail and stories of conjoined life across two centuries.  

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 Yellow rose topiary, big blooms billowing atop ball, ruffled roses commanding attention. Admiration.

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Orange, the color of sunsets missed all summer as I retreated to a bedroom, shades drawn ...  

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 Pinwheels of pain, blue and bursting, radiate from my shoulder, furious fireworks lit and launching off  …  

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Mounded moonbeam tickseed tickles your torso among day lilies that disco-dance in a breeze …  

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We plod in silence through slices of the Sahara the color of honey: wavy and warm  ...

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Garden gargoyle, rumpled of brow, drowsy of eye, pointy of ear, peeks at me as I work the earth ...

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She feels January in her joints,

her bones a built-in bellwether to barometric bounces  ...

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She puffs and the flame, bending and swaying at the top of the solitary birthday candle  ...

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I interviewed Kathy Fish, award-winning writer and teacher. 

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I interviewed Tobi Harper, Deputy Director with Red Hen Press. 

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I interviewed EIC Betsy Boyd and Poetry Editor Micaela Walley with Welter. 

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I interviewed Christy O'Callaghan, Managing Editor with Barzakh. 

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I interviewed Amy Giuffrida, Literary Agent, The Jennifer De Chiara Agency. 

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I interviewed Co-Editors-in-Chief with Exposition Review. 

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I interviewed Janna Maron, Editor & Publisher of Under the Gum Tree. 

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I interviewed Maria Rogers, Literary Agent with The Tobias Agency. 

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I interviewed Lilly Dancyger, author of the memoir, Negative Space. 

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I interviewed K.B. Carle, Associate Editor with Fractured Lit. 

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I interviewed Marissa Glover, Senior Editor with The Lascaux Review. 

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I interviewed Taylor Byas, Poetry Editor with Flypaper Lit. 

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I interviewed Jo Varnish, CNF Editor with X-R-A-Y Magazine. 

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... a devastating diagnosis is not always a death sentence, even when it involves a bleeding brain tumor.

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When I wrote "Singultus” I was enrolled in a six-week writing workshop where we were encouraged to include ...

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“A fiction writer starts with meaning, then manufactures events to represent it. A memoirist starts with events, then ...”  

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I spent my 2017 Thanksgiving in Barcelona. It was a departure, in many ways, from how I typically celebrate this U.S. holiday ...

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There’s no better way for me to remember to appreciate my blessings than to travel, and to begin to understand how the other half ... 

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