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March 1, 2026: Erika J. Simpson

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“Imagine this is your mother”  is the powerful first line of Erika J. Simpson’s debut memoir This Is Your Mother.

Imagine this is your mother. Sallie Carol. Daughter of sharecroppers. Middle of ten. She’s a June Gemini, inquisitive and playful, so sensitive she cries before the switch reaches her legs. She pretends to be the teacher in games of schoolhouse, leads the neighborhood kids on adventures along the creek, and most of all she yearns for a life beyond the fields of North Carolina.

This first chapter, called “Genesis,” continues for only two and a half pages and spirits the reader from Sallie Carol’s childhood to Erika’s departure for college. When we turn the page to the next chapter, it’s a couple of decades later, August of 2013, and Sallie Carol’s cancer is back. The doctors give her two months to live.

In This is Your Mother, two timelines move us forward. In one, Erika is a child growing up in Atlanta with her mother who is trying to make ends meet (and often they don’t), and in the other, Erika is an adult working in Chicago with her mother dying in Atlanta. Erika is creative with structure and form, using second person, lists, transcriptions, short screenplays, a TV game show, and scripture. This memoir is alive on the page.

While Mama studied her Bible, I studied her, making scriptures from the ways she kept us afloat. Book of Sallie Carol 1:2: The only things that matter, and the order of their importance, are food and rent. Don’t pay no bill before you’ve eaten. Because how you look sitting around with all the lights on but nothing to eat?

Erika’s descriptions are substantive and pop with freshness.

Eighties food stamp money: “Oranges and pinks loud enough to be heard. Bright enough to tell everybody in line behind you that you’re on government aid and your daddy left your mama for a white woman …”
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A bus stop: “We ran across the parking lot like the roaches scattering out, heading toward a bus stop that wouldn’t make a comment on our lives.”

Love is everywhere. While her mother’s in jail for writing a bad check for a car, Erika lives in North Carolina with her aunt who has “a house phone normal kids could call.” After almost a year, Erika’s mother comes to get her.

It was spaghetti night. Mama spoke cordial at the table. I felt weird being witnessed this normal, like I lived in the house and Mama lived outside it. I wanted Mama and me to have an inside, but I also didn’t mind being on the outside with her.

In addition to love, this memoir is full of truth, and the humor in truth. Erika refers to the fact that her mother’s cancer is back as “the health reveal.” At one point, when Erika’s cell phone buzzes, she puts it under her pillow and breathes slowly as if she’s asleep, “putting on an act for a woman who’s thousands of miles away.”

Strong sentences bind this book together and add to its heft.

Mama did it wrong, the Great Migration. She went deeper south, instead of north…

The end of October was for pretending life was normal.

You can’t tell if she’s freaking out. But you can’t tell if you are either.

When trying to decide whether she can afford to go visit her mother, Erika writes, “If you wait much longer, it won’t be that you can’t but that you didn’t.”

I’m not going to tell you how the memoir ends. I want to, but I’m not. I will tell you that I loved the ending. Don’t miss this wonderful book. Imagine this is your mother.

Sallie Carol “usually comes over the hill with her suitcase and her cane looking mad as hell.”

Erika was born in North Carolina, grew up in Atlanta, and now lives in Denver, Colorado, with her partner and their black cat. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is the recipient of the 2021 MFA Award in Nonfiction. Her essay “If You Ever Find Yourself” was published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and featured in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. She also writes fiction for the page and screen. When meeting with potential publishers for her memoir, she made sure to ask each editor for their Zodiac sign.

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Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ERIKA J. SIMPSON spends her days.

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February 1, 2026: Barbara Boyle

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Newly retired and on her honeymoon, after spending a week in the south of France, Barbara Boyle and her husband arrived in Italy, and she fell in love. With Monforte, a small town in the Piemonte region. After the honeymoon, Barbara began taking Italian lessons, and her husband Kim signed them up to receive house listings in the Piemonte region. Pinch Me is Barbara’s story of making a dream come true.

It was eighteen months before they were able to return to Italy, but when they did, they met with a real estate agent.

We wanted character and tranquility and were not afraid of a ruin… I wanted birds, grass, mature trees, sun, and shade. My husband wanted a wine cellar.

The day before they were to head home to San Francisco, the real estate agent called to say he had a property to show them, not in Monforte exactly but in nearby Roddino, which was not exactly a town, and actually the house was not exactly in Roddino. “But my husband felt it was worth a quick look, so I reluctantly agreed to go along.”

I turned and faced the empty old house and barn sitting demurely in the afternoon sun—tall, proud stone walls and rusted iron doors, broken windows and shutters, crowned with a roof of old terra-cotta tiles, logs, and twigs. There were two or three outbuildings, crammed with wood, wine barrels, old farm tools, wires, tiles, and stones. The house was situated precariously on a narrow level plain that sloped up the hill behind it and slid into the valley in front. And it looked out over the whole world—vineyards, hazelnut orchards, farms and forests, and even the little hill town of Monforte, all the way out to the craggy Alps, still brushed with just a smattering of snow on the highest peak… I touched him on the arm and said, “This is it.”

These more detailed descriptions of the walls and the roof made me feel as if I were standing in the house looking around and up.

[The walls] are a disorderly combination of Langhe stones and handmade terra-cotta bricks, held together with mud and mortar.

[The roof] was a patchwork of weathered terra-cotta tiles, coppas, interspersed with old logs and branches.

Pinch Me is a delight to read and includes recipes like the “Ravioli del Plin con Burro e Salvia.”

Plin actually means “pinch” in the Piemontese dialect, and it is in fact that characteristic little pinch that separates these raviolis from all others on Earth…. the pinch forms little pockets all around the outside that cradle the ragu or melted butter with sage and Parmesan.

Spending time in Italy was teaching me, firsthand, how something as primal as eating and as simple as shopping, as essential as being part of a small community, creates a life.

Barbara’s fiction has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Star 82 Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other literary journals. In her first life, she was a global creative director in the advertising world, living in Paris, Frankfurt, New York, and San Francisco. While living in Paris, she took the Regional French Cuisine course at Le Cordon Bleu, and later in New York, she completed the professional cooking course at The Institute of Culinary Education. These days she lives in Italy, in the medieval hill towns of Roddino and Monforte, cooking, taking walks, working in her garden, in her husband’s vineyard, and on a novel.

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December 1, 2025: CMarie Fuhrman

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When CMarie Fuhrman was a child living in Colorado, her parents built a bedroom on the patio so she “would stop sleeping in the grass beneath the clothesline,” but, she writes in her first essay in Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, “I have never been so deeply wild as in Idaho.” 

I am in love with this Salmon River country. The steep slopes, wind-swept trees, the deer and elk—it’s where I feel most myself, most free. Yet the land holds a fierce beauty, a danger in its summer heat. Even those who share my love for it could crush my spirit with their conflicting desires.

The fourteen essays in Salmon Weather are personal narratives. “Walking the land, I have gotten to know who I am through what I stand for.” They are “women with nature” adventure stories. “We hike to abandoned mines, decommissioned fire lookouts, and forgotten ghost towns. We like to reimagine lives in these places.” CMarie is in conversation with the land, the river, the fish and snakes and fawns. She’s in relationship with everything that is out there.

Her stories feel alive. Describing deep snow, she writes

I almost wrote “buried instead of covered, but there is nothing dead about the scene. I like to think of the cold and white that covers the small trees as a quilt with a batting of winter that knows how to tuck a young pine in. I imagine what those saplings feel as the snow becomes their air and sky…

CMarie is not just telling us a story. As in the excerpt above, she’s allowing us to witness the making of the story, with the writer and story “ever-evolving,” shaping each other. And she invites the reader in.

But this bridge is not on the road that this story is interested in.
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And I keep coming back to the coyote because I work in metaphor. Symbol. I see patterns. I find story.
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I cross out what I have written…
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Stop for a moment and wonder at what you see.

In addition to an essayist, CMarie is a poet, and she brings a poet’s sensibility to the words she chooses and the rhythm of the sentences.

The trail, like the river, like the fish, pre-date white settlement, yet it was formed by human feet. It is kept up now by hooves and paws and on a day in late May, the tread of my own soles, following the tread of my partner, who has promised me wonder.

Salmon Weather is the second title in The Nature Series at DLJ Books published by Columbus State University Press. It was chosen as a Library of Congress “Great Reads from Great Places.”

CMarie is host of Colorado Public Radio’s “Terra Firma,” an award-winning columnist for the Inlander, the Associate Director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, the founder of the Confluence Writing Community, and a former Idaho Writer in Residence. In addition to Salmon Weather, she is also the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam and the co-editor of two anthologies: the multi-award-winning Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She is of Acoma Pueblo descent and a mix of European blood, and she lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. This January she will teach at the Writing By Writers workshop, “Get the Lead Out.”

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October 1, 2025: Deborah Jackson Taffa

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Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Whiskey Tender is her first book and is the story of her childhood. The memoir’s cover features a photo of seven-year-old Deborah and her three sisters sitting with their father. Deborah describes them.

We were unruly Indian girls, not the friendly Thanksgiving Day types who knew how to cook and behave.

As we read Whiskey Tender, we grow up with Deborah. Except for the first, the chapters proceed chronologically. Each one is titled and dated by year from 1972 to 1987. Each one is filled with details that recreate moments. In the first chapter, their dad heats their shoes in front of the fire as they camp by the river. In the second, they watch their neighbor weep after his dog Rocco dies. In the third, their mother plays the Temptations at midnight and teaches the girls how to do the twist.

Deborah is Native, but her parents “wanted their kids to be mainstream Americans.” Apparently so did the schools, who ignored Native culture and history. One of the reasons Deborah wrote this memoir is so Native kids could “feel more connected and less lonely.”

I underlined so many sentences. The short ones are declaratory and strong. They say I know what I’m talking about.

We sisters were broken girls.

Look at the work the adjective broken is doing here. It makes us feel something and causes us to want to know broken how?

The desert reduced Mom, like town did Dad.

Here, it’s the verb doing the work of making us feel something. And this sentence feels sword-like. A quick slash to make the point that her parents were never going to be happy at the same time in the same place.

The year I turned four, Mom was sometimes happy.

In this sentence, it’s the adverb that makes things interesting, that makes us want to know when her mother was happy.

The next sentence is a longer, more complicated one that is interesting for its use of Indian as a verb, as well as for its use of the noun Indianness in the same sentence.

Lots of guys in Dad’s generation thought poverty was an expression of Indianness itself, and they tried to out-Indian each other by resisting regular jobs.

And here’s an example of Deborah tying two sentences together with metaphor to make meaning come alive for the reader.

A storm was brewing between my parents about mobility and money. Even as a pre-schooler, I could feel it like I felt the shift in humidity before it thundered and rained.

The first chapter, which is given to us out of order, takes place in 1981, when Deborah is twelve. It’s called “Animas” for the “River of Souls” where the shoes are being heated by the fire and for the story that takes place by its banks and anchors it. As the first chapter, it sets the stage for the stories to follow.

…I hold my ancestors close to my heart, knowing I too will be an ancestor someday, adding to the chain of lives that came before. With death as my guide, I remember what’s important, and listen for the river even now. “Do not participate in the erasure of your own people,” the voices murmur. “Do not be a silent witness as we fade.”

Whiskey Tender was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as a longlisted title for a 2025 Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. It was awarded a Southwest Book Prize and an International Latino Book Award. It was also named a Top Ten Book of 2024 by The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and Audible.

Deborah earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and she is currently the director of the MFA CW Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a 2024 NEA Fellow and a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History. She was selected for the 2024 Poets & Writers 5 over 50 feature and is currently working on a sequel to Whiskey Tender.

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Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA spends her days.

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September 1, 2025: Maureen Stanton

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At the age of 35, Maureen Stanton quit her job to focus on her dream of becoming a writer. At 40, she graduated from an MFA program where she wrote the first draft of a memoir that would be published, yes, but not for 25 years. In 2024The Murmur of Everything Moving won the Donald L. Jorden Literary Prize, which grants the recipient $10,000, and publication by Columbus State University Press, located just a few miles from where I live in Columbus, Georgia.

In between the first draft of The Murmur of Everything Moving and its publication in March, Maureen has not been sitting around eating bonbons. In 2012, her debut, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting was published and won a Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. And in 2019, her second book, Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, was published and won the Maine Literary Award for memoir.

The Murmur of Everything Moving, a title I love for its length, its sound, its evocation of the heart and time, is a memoir of love and illness. A beautiful one-and-a-half page Prologue begins with Maureen’s memory of being six and walking down the street with Frankie S, the boy next door, and culminates with the three sentences below that tell the story of the memoir.

When I met Steve, at 27 he wanted, for the first time in his life, to find love. At 23, full of myself, I thought I knew what love was. In time, we would both learn about love, the hard way.

Maureen and Steve meet in the 1980’s. Early on, Maureen must decide whether to stay in Michigan with Steve or return to Boston. She calls her mother. “Just follow your heart,” her mother tells her. “Everything was clear then,” she writes. “[M]y heart was with Steve, and Steve was in Michigan.”

Of course, it’s not that easy; relationships never are.

Quickly my life in Michigan failed to live up to my expectations, though I wasn’t even sure what my expectations were. I hadn’t envisioned this life I’d chosen, hadn’t put any rational thought into my decision to move here and live with Steve.

At a year and a half in, they hit a particularly rough spot, which coincides with the arrival of Maureen’s sister Sally in Michigan. Sally is full of life and plans, and Maureen understands that she has lost herself.

In the year or so that I lived with Steve, I hadn’t swum at the Y, I hadn’t seen a foreign film or visited an art gallery. I hadn’t written any stories. I’d traded my night time reading for snuggling with Steve on the couch, watching television. For comfort and safety, for love, I’d opted for passivity, for a circumscribed world.

A month later, the Challenger explodes, and Steve checks into the hospital with acute back pain. We are on page sixty-eight. Part II, of the book and their life together, begins.

Throughout the memoir, Maureen weaves in moments of her past that enlarge the current narrative. For example, as a child, she stepped into deep water in a lake, where it was quiet and dreamy. After being rescued, she fell asleep to her babysitters singing love songs. “For a long time after, I associated loving somebody with that feeling of drowning.”

The writing is clear and a pleasure to read. Maureen will often start a paragraph with a short declarative sentence that grounds us, like “In love we are vulnerable,” or “Places shape us.” As we read on, she goes into more detail. And Maureen also writes sentences that lift us off the page.

There are moments in our lives when the wick of desire is lit, when standing on a threshold we glimpse possibility, a larger world that awaits us, and we are forever changed.

Maureen lives in Maine and teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Some of you may already know Maureen and Steve’s story from a NYT Modern Love column that appeared last June entitled, “An Engagement Ring, but No Fiancé.”

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Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how MAUREEN STANTON spends her days.

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June 1, 2025: Mary Carroll Moore

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With summer right around the corner, I’m excited to tell you about Mary Carroll Moore’s Last Bets, which takes place on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. I don’t know about you, but these days, I’m looking for books (and shows and movies) with strong female leads. And Last Bets has not just one, but two. I read it over a year ago, and Elly and Rosie are still with me.

Elly didn’t call herself a scuba diver, but she’d loved her first taste of diving on her last visit. She hadn’t imagined how silent it could be, deep in the ocean, just the sound of her own breathing…

Rosie loved to sit on the seawall and watch the line between ocean and sky blur to near invisible. As was their habit after dinner, her dad gathered his marks for the evening games, while she got herself an iced coffee and took her place on the rocky edge.

Elly comes to Bonaire from Washington, DC where her husband has recently died and her finances are nonexistent. She wants to get away but also to finish a painting and get paid for it. Rosie is sixteen and a thief, slipping into guest rooms at the resort where her father plays backgammon. If she doesn’t straighten up, she will be heading to boarding school (death) instead of the art institute (life). Freedom and art are on the line for both of them.

In the excerpt below, notice how Mary uses heat to add tension to the story.

It hadn’t been more than thirty minutes, tops, but the sun was out now, the air steaming. Elly already felt the heat building. She walked back to the apartment, inhaling the now familiar scent of hot pine and strong herbs, hoping she’d remembered to leave the window shutters open.

Throughout the book, Mary activates our senses thereby placing us in scene with the characters—from the scent of hot pine above to the waves pounding the beach below.

Outside the waves pounded the beach. The wind picked up, and it had cleared, as promised, the blue sky glaringly bright. [Elly] heard voices from the the bar, the lunchtime buffet opening; she should go get a sandwich, a salad, before they closed. Instead, she bent to lift the pastel stick from its foam nest. For a half hour, she lost herself in the simple choices of line, shape, and color.

Rosie’s sneaking around also adds tension to the story. Here she is in Elly’s room. “Behind the [bathroom] door hung a red silk kimono, the first hint of unique.” When Rosie finds the art supplies, she opens the boxes of pastels.

She hadn’t planned to do anything, just look. But suddenly her fingers were reaching for a stick of buttery yellow. She broke off a tiny chip. Again, with a carnelian pastel. She arranged the chips in a soft tissue, wrapped them gently, and stowed them in the pocket of her shorts. Then she replaced each broken pastel in its slot and turned the stick so the disfigured edge was hidden.

Elly would know. Eventually. Rosie didn’t know why she wanted that, wanted Elly even to suspect her, but she didn’t think about it. Owning something of Elly’s felt intensely important in that moment. Something they shared, like art.

Yet it wasn’t quite enough…

Backgammon gambling is the evening activity on Bonaire, but risk-taking is not limited to the stone tables. Elly and Rosie ignore the odds stacked against them, refuse to follow the rules, and set traps for each other. When we discover a hurricane is on the way (another layer of tension), it feels as if danger is everywhere, but Elly and Rosie bet on themselves.

Last Bets received a starred Kirkus review and was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Last Bets at the Atlanta airport

Mary is the author of two other novels. A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, which also features strong female characters. Kate and Red are pilots and estranged sisters from opposite sides of a fractured family. They are thrown together in a search and rescue in the Adirondack mountains of New York State when Red is framed for the brutal attack on the manager of her indie rock band. Qualities of Light, a YA queer novel, features sixteen-year-old Molly, who when tragedy strikes, must confront her own qualities of light and darkness. This novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards,

Since 2008, the same year I began Catching Days, Mary has sent Your Weekly Writing Exercises each Friday to subscribers around the world. She has taught at the Loft Literary Center, Grub Street, the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and has YouTube and Spotify channels. In 2011, her writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, a product of those workshops, won the New Hampshire Literary “Reader’s Choice” award.

Although creatively she began as a painter, Mary’s website now tells you, “When I’m not writing, I paint. Mostly in plein air. I’m fascinated with the way light creates form, color, and luminosity.” Her paintings have been exhibited nationally since 2002, and are in permanent collections, including the Pacific Street Gallery in New London.

Mary is, or has been, a journalist, a songwriter, and a singer in a band. In the 1980s, she went from writing a food column for Sedona Life magazine, to writing cookbooks, to writing a syndicated weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and then to writing two spirituality-self-help books. A 2007 New York Times article featuring Mary’s painting begins, “Mary Carroll Moore, a resident of Bridgewater, radiates such calm that it is hard to believe the extent of her accomplishments.” Almost twenty years later, I second that.

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Laurie Stone in 2022 at age 76

October 1, 2024: Laurie Stone

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Laurie Stone might be the most interesting writer I read. I like what she has paid attention to in her life and the way she allows it to mix with what she is paying attention to now and the way it all spills out of her onto the page. Oldster Magazine, which I love, introduced me to Laurie through her regular feature “Notes on Another New Life.” After that, I read her most recent book, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was published in 2022 and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Now I read her Substack, “Everything is Personal,” which is in its third year, has over 10,000 readers, and which Lit Hub recently named as one of the seven best literary publications on Substack.

In the introduction to Streaming Now, Laurie says that this book marks a shift in the way she writes.

When my sister was dying, I would walk in the city mornings and sit on a bench and write what came to mind, and I got to thinking of these exercises as ‘postcards’ …

I have been writing in this form since then. What is the form? You could see it as a series of ‘meanwhiles.’ Also, as a series of ‘yes, ands’… I have been wondering how to describe what people will read in this book, composed almost entirely of these intimate dispatches that, garnered together, form an atmosphere.

Here’s the bit I think goes straight to the heart of why I love to read her:

[T]his book invites something of the overheard of life and the caught-in-the-act of life, the dashed-off idea that can be exaggerated and raw.”

On July 22, 2020 Laurie remembers a man burning incense on Halsey Street in Brooklyn. It’s a hot day in Hudson, NY, where Laurie is physically located. Beckett’s plays pass through, she bought a pot roast, she and the man she lives with watched Roma on Netflix, and

I found postcards my mother had sent me at camp. She said, “I miss you. I can’t wait for you to come home.” And I could see her standing alone in the back of our little house in Long Beach, staring past the flagstone patio to a giant green hedge.

And, Laurie remembers that her sister died three years ago the day before.

In September 2020, she sees a friend on Zoom. In the bath, “I thought with distaste about abstract nouns such as conflict and abuse, although I like the phrase coined by Sarah Schulman that is also the title of a book she wrote, Conflict Is Not Abuse.” Laurie writes to the friend she saw on Zoom, whom she knew when they were in their thirties… Excerpts don’t do this type of writing justice. The thoughts are so intertwined and particular, and part of their beauty is the way one thing leads to another. There’s more, and then there’s this:

That’s when I slipped back to the party at the giant apartment of Nanette Ranone, how I had marveled at such a place with so many rooms and women living together with lovers and children and conflict. How could there not be conflict, and how could women not want to help each other through our beautiful, awkward lives? I missed the sense of being on the lip of things about to unfold: the large and small details of female existence, how we talk to each other, how we can’t wait to tell each other what we are doing and thinking about, how we take each other’s faces in our hands. Nothing is more interesting, not really, if you wake us suddenly in the middle of the night and say, “Who are you? What happened to you along the way?”

Click on “Everything is Personal” to take a look at Laurie’s Substack. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s a new way of creating and distributing literary writing. It’s also a community where readers and writers can interact with each other. If you subscribe to “Everything is Personal,” which I recommend, Laurie’s writing will arrive in your inbox. Here are my top three favorite pieces from the last year.

“Two Mistakes,” from March 17, 2024, begins like this: “I’m thinking about two mistakes I made that seem related. The first is getting married in 1966, when I was nineteen. The second is not finishing my dissertation.” If you got married at nineteen (or twenty like I did), this essay will likely give you back a thought or two you’ve forgotten, as well as some thoughts you’ve never had, and at the least, another chance to look back at your young self with curiosity and compassion. There were so many of us doing the same damn thing.

“Anatomy of a Fall,” March 27, 2024, is about the 2023 French film directed by Justine Triet from a screenplay she co-wrote with Arthur Harari. I’m not even going to try to excerpt anything. Especially if you’re a woman, you just need to click over and read it all.

“The Grandstand and the Arena,” from June 25, 2024, I think about all the time. The subtitle is “Where do you live?” Here are the first two sentences: “In my twenties, I knew a woman who said to me, “You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life.” We were in graduate school at Columbia.” I love the way this essay winds around, all its twists and turns, and again, to appreciate it fully you will have to read it for yourself. But in the excerpt below, you will see, I started to say what Laurie does best, but she does so many things best… In any event, you will see.

That insight or prediction [“You live in the grandstand rather than the arena of life”] has been the shadow hanging over my life ever since. Not really and yet maybe really. I just said it. It just came to me, the way everything I write just comes to me unplanned, as the keys click along, as if guided by spirits the way a ouija board is guided, or by some collective unconscious or dybbuk.

Laurie Stone was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, a theater critic for The Nation, and a critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian Prize in Excellence in Criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also writes for The Paris Review, Evergreen Review, and n + 1 and is the author of six books.

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August 1, 2024: Roberta S. Kuriloff

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When Roberta S. Kuriloff was six, her mother died of cancer, and her father took her and her brother to live with his sister on a farm in New Jersey. Shortly thereafter, her aunt was also diagnosed with cancer, and her father moved the children to an orphanage. He visited regularly but was unable to care for them on a daily basis. As an adult, Roberta became an attorney, and her first job was working for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association in the Family Law Unit where she helped families in emotional and financial crisis.

On a trip to Maine, Roberta and Mary Ann, her partner, bought a piece of property with the dream of moving out of the city. They talked of building “a feminist retreat center for learning and sharing, with a bookstore and a coffee house.” While still living in New Haven, Roberta organized a public reading by the poet Audre Lorde. “Her voice made me float on waves of erotic air. I’d never heard anyone read so sensually. Her voice could move mountains.”

After Roberta and Mary Ann decided to go their separate ways, Roberta wondered whether to go forward with moving. As she thought about it, she “sensed that something, more than just land…something I wouldn’t discover in New Haven” was pulling her to Maine. She wanted a different life—she wanted to be creative again. So at the age of thirty-nine, she persevered on her own to make it happen. Framing a Life is the perfect title for her memoir.

In Maine Roberta met with a mason and a well-digger. She chose the direction the house should face and decided on chimney size. She ordered firewood for the woodstove that would be in her new house.

At night, I couldn’t sleep, with a to-do bulletin board percolating in my head. I jumped out of bed at five o’clock, cooked scrambled eggs and hot chocolate, and burned my tongue.

These next two paragraphs detail her days as she not only built a house but also a life.

[My builders, Sue and Niki, and I] fell into a routine. Each day started about seven and ended around four, with a lunch break where the three of us sat cross-legged in a circle on the house deck, music lowered, to chat and eat, surrounded by tools and sawhorses. Every morning I walked Maya [a white husky] before work, and then at day’s end…

The days tumbled into each other, and I lost track. It was odd, not having client appointments or looking at a calendar. My to-do list was also shorter—sleep, build, walk Maya, try to study for the bar, and eat. In the dark of night, I sat on the deck of my rental, looking up and viewing a full moon, the stars bright and Blue Hill Mountain sharply visible in my view. I was a happy camper.

Roberta S. Kuriloff is a founding member of two domestic violence projects as well as an elderly services organization, and she has also been a Hospice patient-volunteer and bereavement workshop facilitator. In addition to writing, she likes to drink tea with jam and to dance. She and her spouse, Bernice, have been together since 1995 and happily married since 2013. Spoiler alert—they live in the home she built in the woods of Maine.

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Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how ROBERTA S. KURILOFF spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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February 1, 2024: T Kira Madden

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If you’re interested in the different selves we’ve been or in childhoods and how they turn into adulthoods or in families and truth, and you haven’t yet read Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden’s debut memoir published in 2019, add it to your list. After an author’s note and a preface, here’s the first sentence, “My mother rescued a mannequin from the J.C. Penney dump when I was two years old.” T Kira (no period) describes her mother as a “Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman.” Although the first piece is called “Uncle Nuke,” which is what T Kira calls the mannequin, the takeaway is that T Kira and her mother are wrapped in their own special world. Here, at the beginning, the author asks us to remember

[A]ll the reasons she [her mother] did anything–the wrong things, the strange things, the dangerous, the sublime–the reasons she does any of it, still, is to protect me.

What I love almost as much as the memoir is the story of how this book came to exist in the world–that T Kira had planned on writing a novel, but that after her father died, it was these stories that had to be told. The memoir rose up out of loss (“Just last week I had a father”). And it was written as an offering to others. As stated in the Acknowledgements, “because once, a little girl needed more stories like her own.”

When T Kira was nine years old, her grandmother gave her a typewriter and told her to write about her life. Instead, T Kira wrote about a girl named Joni Baloney who was just like her except she was “white and athletic and people tend to grope her.” After recounting a few of Joni’s exploits, T Kira added, “I can do things like that when I write–pluck any thread of want and create a whole world.” The pages of this memoir are steeped in want–in need and in desire. And each essay creates a whole world.

The writing is extraordinary–sharp sentences, descriptions that are fresh and alive, and honesty and heart in equal measure. Here’s one of those sentences. “The day stings against my arms.” And one of those descriptions, “fingers like ginger root.” Take a look at this sentence, one of my favorites for all it does.

[My father’s] eyes are wet and wide in that orange glow of night-road, that perfect combination of street lamp and moonlight that casts a terrific sadness, or wildness, on any face in its spell.

This next example shows the honesty and heart I was talking about. It comes after a middle school dance where the date turned out not to be a date, and it begins with her mother’s response, “To hell with middle school dances. We”ll have our own dance.”

The three of us dance in a circle, facing one another on the gum-bald carpet, snapping our fingers, throwing the dice. My father lets me stand on his feet as he shuffles and grooves. He holds me tight. He dips my body backward till the room tips over. He says, One day, you won’t even remember this night ever was.

A few years later, a wildly different situation but that same honesty and heart.

By nine p.m., almost a hundred people arrive at our Porn Star Party. Public and private school kids, a couple of dealers we know, the older boyfriends of girls in my grade… Harley, Nelle, and I take every shot we’re given… We lie down on my pool table and begin to kiss one another while the boys and men cheer us on.
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Cousin Cindy once asked me, What do you think love really is?
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I think it’s being able to kiss someone whenever you want, I said.
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I can kiss Nelle whenever I want. And I do.

There’s more, so much more. The memoir is also a story of addiction and trauma and family secrets…

If we’re lucky, we use our childhood and adolescence to try on different versions of our self. If we’re lucky, we get closer and closer to who we really are.

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award for lesbian memoir, and is now in development as a feature film.

T Kira Māhealani Madden is a Chinese, Kānaka Maoli writer, photographer, and amateur magician. Her gorgeous wedding was profiled in The New York Times. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She’s also the founding editor of the journal No Tokens. Her debut novel, Whidbey, is forthcoming with Mariner/HarperCollins.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how T KIRA MADDEN spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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October 1, 2023: Minda Honey

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Of all the cool places where you can find Minda Honey’s writing, my favorite might be her now retired advice column at LEO Weekly, which publishes Louisville, Kentucky’s arts and entertainment news. For three and a half years, you could ask Minda Honey anything. For example, “How can I be a better me after a break-up?” Minda recommended books, podcasts, and distractions. For example, listen to “‘Big Magic’ by Elizabeth Gilbert. This podcast is all about getting unstuck creatively. When you’re serving your most creative self, you really don’t have time for any nonsense in your life.”

Minda’s relationship expertise was hard-earned as is evident in her debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, which will be published on October 1st, the same day as her essay on how she spends her days. When the memoir opens, Minda is twenty-three and still dating her high school boyfriend. Together they set off from Louisville, where they’d grown up, to Orange County, California to house-sit for her boyfriend’s grandparents.

In May, we loaded up my little red Jetta for our road trip. I decided to leave my socks behind. I wouldn’t need them where we were headed. We didn’t own a GPS unit–they were still a luxury–and neither one of us could read a road atlas. So, we printed directions from MapQuest.com and followed each numbered turn and exit carefully from state to state, pitching crumpled-up sheets of paper into the back seat as we went.

Minda grew up reading Harlequin romances and memorized the formula that led to love. When she was twelve, her parents divorced.

Witnessing the end of my parents’ marriage deepened my subconscious belief that if I wanted happiness, if I wanted stability. If I wanted more than misery in the morning and arguing in the evening, then I needed to live my life by the rules of a love story.

The Heartbreak Years, with its beautiful cover, is the story of a young woman just out of college as she lives through her twenties, date by date and bar by bar, and how she manages to break free of her childhood fantasies in order to become an independent, resilient Black woman in a big world.

…I was never meant to be linear… [M]y progress in life wouldn’t come in a series of checkboxes. I grow like an ocean, swelling with energy. Understanding comes in waves. Then, recedes and returns. Always bringing me back to myself…

As far as family and race, Minda is the daughter of a Black veteran and a Filipino immigrant. “I am a Black woman,” she writes. “Yes, I am Filipino because my mother is Filipino.” But she’s never been to the Phillipines and didn’t grow up in that culture. “I grew up in the South in an all-white neighborhood, and I was the only Black kid in my class until I switched schools in fourth grade.”

Minda always wanted to be a writer, and although Orange County did not provide a permanent love interest, it was here that she first took herself seriously as a writer and joined a writing group. And it was not far from here, at the University of California, Riverside, that she received her MFA in non-fiction creative writing.

For more from Minda, check out her series of essays at Longreads on dating and politics. Her writing has also been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, and Teen Vogue. Essays by Minda can be found in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger” by Seal Press and in the Hub City Press collection, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South.” She is the former director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University and the current editor of Black Joy at Reckon News.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how MINDA HONEY spends her days.