When you can’t write, you write lists. To-do lists. Reading lists. Life lists. Lists of things to be repaired or fixed. Packing lists. Shopping lists. You write longhand in tight, tiny letters that you need paper towels, eggs, butter, apples, chicken breasts, and spinach.
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Recently I noticed that whenever I answer the front door wearing an apron, the person on the doorstep looks me up and down. A flicker of surprise crosses their face. Whether it’s the postman, the plumber, or a friend, there is the same moment of surprise. This flicker got me thinking: What is normal for me, putting on an apron to mix dough, vacuum the stairs, or tip stock into a colander, is less so for others. Wearing an apron to the front door is as mildly provocative as opening it in my dressing gown. At the very least it isn’t what the person on the doorstep expects me to be wearing.
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Each time my Mexican-American family returns for a stretch to Oaxaca, I start a blog. During our first week here on my Fulbright grant, I spend all day on the street, eating tacos, taking photos of topiary depicting Jesus on the cross, following the whine and bang of firecrackers to the nearest roving banda.
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“The comments are a shit show.” This from a friend on Facebook, a warning perhaps or an expression of vicarious disappointment. “I read the first one and threw my phone across the room.”
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I am nearing the end of my first writerly—read, sedentary—summer ever.
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I have come home again, to Arkansas, to sink down my roots into the only home I have ever known. My mom has dug rocks out of the hard Arkansas soil, planted sweet peas, basil, hollyhocks, marigolds, and distributed loads of manure over the garden—slowly she expands her territory.
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In the first few months after the baby is born, I experience a singing clarity: Milk! Diapers! Milk! Diapers! Lusty oxytocin! Sleep! Cheez-it binge! Sleep! I have cleared out a space–no, cleared out my whole brain–for this time, and I have no expectation of writing.
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Two years ago, when I was living in Mexico City in a rented room that faced a noisy gas station and made me an insomniac for the first time in my life, I got the news that my book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico, would be published.
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Last week in Mumbai, trying to recover from some respiratory bug that is clinging like scale to my throat and lungs, I stared at the brick walls of my room, and listened to the barks and yells and mumbles from the street against a background of near-constant honking horns.
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If you are ever nineteen and living in San Francisco for the first time, working at your first writing job, getting paid, getting laid, carousing 24/7…
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My favorite story from my college years wasn’t one I heard in a Creative Writing workshop. I didn’t hear it in any lit seminar…
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Recently, I published a short essay about saying goodbye to my husband before his first deployment. The piece is, as you might imagine, a crier…
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