Category: Non-Fiction

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...

after Susan Sontag Blanca tells me to try the holistic vet down in Pacifica who’s been treating Hope, her shepherd-mix, with acupuncture. “It’s amazing,” she says. I leave three messages before the office calls back and tells me...

“Born in 55,” my sister’s voice is thin and raspy when I ask her how old she is on her birthday. She doesn’t mention her new nursing home. In her little wooden rocking chair, tears running down her cheeks, in a sweet soprano she...

I cried off and on through each of the long episodes about the climate crisis and what smart, dedicated folks around the world were doing to restore whatever had been destroyed or lost. When I finished streaming the last of the...

The leaves were changing along with the weather. There is only one thing that meant…school was starting. I was going into my sophomore year of high school; my brother was in seventh grade. From personal experience, seventh grade...

I’d send you out of this world into the gallery of night in jujube wood, sycamore and cedar like a pharaoh in a solar boat, but it was broad daylight as you embarked in your coffin, plain pine, marked simply with the star of...

Having recently turned 79, and as a survivor of 11 surgeries (including two kidney transplants, a brace of knee replacements, a cardiac bypass, and a spinal fusion procedure), this seems a propitious time to reflect on the...

Joe has a penchant for disappearing. This makes the employees at the places he frequents in Roscommon uneasy. He has no family and is nearing his mid-eighties. More paranoid people fear he’s tripped over his monstrously furry...