Category: Non-Fiction

It was 1958 and Cardinal Roncalli of Venice had just been selected as Pope John XXIII by the College of Cardinals. I was sitting in my fourth-grade class with 62 other nine year olds in Notre Dame Grammar School. In today’s era...

Have you ever read a novel where every sentence played like a superbly composed hit song? That’s how I would describe this work of historical fiction, THE CALAMITY CLUB, by Kathryn Stockett. When I picked up this 634-page...

I put down the book I was reading and watched my bride moving around the kitchen of the tiny apartment, getting ready to put dinner on the table. “You’re gorgeous,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. She turned to me, held my...

Eyes closed. Face down. This time I’m on the ground. Not positioned mid-air, waist-high on a cushioned table. That green padding, soft cream sheet smelling like om. Gongs, chimes, a soundtrack; cymbals signaling it’s time....

Many people think of trauma solely as an incident that happened to us or someone else that is intense, violent, or life-threatening; however, trauma can also be a suffering from emotional or psychological pain that results in...

“You’re gonna have to up your game tomorrow—Carol’s on the truck!” That thrown down at me from the truck window and Clayton B. Hill—a big man, and owner and operator of Clayton B. Hill Sanitation. “Double route tomorrow and...

Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” Truman Capote took it a step further as it applied to writing when he said, “Any work of art, provided it springs from a...

Lately, I have found myself increasingly interested in reading works about translation, including the recent illuminating book, The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls. Reading about translation has revivified my approach...

My mother’s moods could swing on a dime. She did temp jobs for a living, most of them rarely lasting more than a week. Nana, my grandma, never really told me the whole story about Mom. She’d just say: “Your mother, she has...

Although my brother’s seizures came without a pattern of frequency—sometimes two in a month and sometimes once a year—they always came at night. Mama would wake me after she had placed Cary in the passenger seat, guide me...