family

Features

Family Trees

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My grandfather, a young boy in a red coat wandering the deep and snowy Lithuanian woods, found a litter of wolf cubs in a hollowed oak that had been rent by lightning. He placed the abandoned pups in the hood of his coat and carried them home, where he raised them, or he let them go, or he began a new narrative of our family inextricably linked ever after with white and quiet woods, with dogs, with hollowness sometimes filled by something unexpected. Soon after, he moved to Warsaw, where he stayed and where I, eventually, came from.

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Body of Work

Her Hair

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While riding my university shuttle, I used to stare at women’s hair. They were mostly young white women like me, who would sit in rows facing each other at the front of the bus, compulsively checking their phones.

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The Writing Life

I Use My Body Like Money

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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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