Tiny Commotions

Let me tell you how writing used to be. When I was eighteen, twenty, twenty-two years old, I could sit with a notebook, at a keyboard, in the margins of a textbook, and words would pour out without hesitation. I could do 5000 words in a couple of hours, 10000 in a night, hopped up on nothing but diner coffee and Camel Lights. It felt so natural, that I’d unlocked this superpower. I could turn […]

The hotel was gabled stone building, fitted with a conical turret and Gothic Revival windows. We found it on a narrow curving highway, just under the south side of a high truss bridge we crossed accidentally several times because the combination of left-side driving and roundabouts are like kryptonite for my father. The weather was bleak, even for the Scottish Highlands. We trundled in, dripping, over the threadbare floral carpet. The walls were high, papered […]

It begins at the end of August 2019, the week before Labor Day. I have returned bedraggled, overstuffed, feeling old and tired after the second of the three music festivals I committed myself to this summer. So grossed out by my own indulgence, I make a spreadsheet labeled ATONEMENT, which I will use to get my life in order, tracking exercise, food, money, all the things that seem to be spiraling out of control, and […]

Sometime around the beginning of my eighth-grade year, the most popular girl in my class came to school in a tie-dyed Beatles t-shirt and Birkenstocks with her brand name soccer shorts. And suddenly, seemingly overnight, all the girls that had been crushing on George Michael started talking about Jerry Garcia all the time. It was 1989, but at Asheville Junior High School, anyway, the sixties had properly begun. There were a lot of reasons for […]

I’m a cis woman and I’m heterosexual-ish. I have moments. I have slightly more than incidental tendencies, according to some one or another Kinsey scale test I took in college. There is Samira Wiley.  There was Katherine Hepburn in “Sylvia Scarlett” and a fair number of 21st century women  who look a little like Katherine Hepburn in “Sylvia Scarlett.” There is the  fantasy version of me that I do not and will not ever look […]