Category: Non-Fiction

Friedrich Schiller: “Art is the daughter of freedom.” I am not alone in believing his ‘Ode to Joy’ was actually code for ‘Ode to Freedom’ which would be censored in his time. In German, this would scan: ‘Freude’ or ‘Freiheit’....

The men’s bar is packed with attractive men with carefully sculpted bodies, tight jeans and leather jackets. To reach a table, the four of us envision squeezing through bodies that are jammed up against each other as though by...

We were a couple for twelve years before deciding to become parents, four years living together, and eight years married. Together we made a commitment to alter our life path. We saw hope and possibility; conflict and pain would...

I couldn’t remember the date of my mother’s birthday. I needed to find out because the U.S. State Department wanted to know. Otherwise, they wouldn’t issue me a new passport. My mother had been dead for over thirty years, and I...

18,000 deceased patients sleep in unmarked graves because Koch Hospital’s cemetery records were destroyed in a fire. The last exit leaving St. Louis on the J. B. Bridge— Koch Road. But what remains in my mother’s mind, is the...

I Imagine being on the 14th floor alone in an empty building. The carpeting is red. I feel like I’m inside a red oyster shell, a darkroom of loneliness with nothing to break the quiet. Red reaches out with stinky hands like the...

When I was young, I was fat. I used to weigh myself before I urinated and then right after, to see how much weight I had lost. It was never enough. My parents got me a calorie-counting chart with a revolving disk that was to be...

Odessa’s children will have no sea to play in this summer because of wastes from the destruction of the Kakhkovka Dam. The sea is a nourishing supplement to the mind as well as the body. So much has been taken from the children...

Arriving home after a weekend away, I immediately knew something was terribly wrong. His new, beloved, prized possession, a blue and white Ford pickup truck, was parked diagonally in the driveway as he would NEVER have done....

We were one of the few Jewish families in the northern New York village of Tupper Lake. This had nothing to do with why we were taking a car trip into the deep South, although it did play a part in how our stay ended. My father...