On the morning of January 31, 1969, I was about to give birth to my first child. I was 20 years old. Whether the child was a boy or girl, I knew what the baby’s name would be. I hadn’t thought much beyond that—except that I knew I wanted to raise a child who was […]
Dispatches From the Front
My heart is moved by all I cannot saveso much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with thosewho age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources” The past two years have been a daily barrage of news flashes portending the downfall of our democracy. Children […]
Across the Great Lakes
“Haunting” is a word that comes to mind as I reflect on Lee Zacharias’ new novel. Set largely in the mid-1930’s on Lake Michigan and the harbor town of Frankfort, Across the Great Lake is the narrator’s vivid, jagged, time-bending recollection of her childhood and the trajectory set by one of the central events of […]
Events for The Last Straw by Bryant Holsenbeck
As I moved through my friend Bryant Holsenbeck’s new book, The Last Straw, I was struck by its accessibility. The book, ostensibly about Bryant’s journey to rid single-use plastic from her life, is really about us. I found it subversive how she asks us to see the world through her eyes, stealthily offering a blueprint […]
Territories of the Soul
Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora brilliantly articulates how black diasporic belonging transcends dominant understandings of identity based on locality/time/space. By analyzing the modalities in which “difficulty and loss” (5) become affective spaces of communal negation, Ellis explores the “gap between here and there” where the black diasporic subject’s […]
Ursula K. Le Guin
Once upon a time I used Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea in a first-year writing class centered on the theme of what makes a hero. I loved it. The students loved it. Since then, though, she has mostly hovered around the edges of my consciousness, even though she is among the most […]
Labyrinths
I wasn’t familiar with labyrinths until I started an internship at the Resource Center back in 2009. One of my duties during that year was helping Jeanette Stokes haul our large canvas labyrinth around to different spaces in North Carolina and set it up for people to walk. A few weeks ago, for the first […]
Whiskey & Ribbons: A Novel
Click here to read RCWMS Communications Director Meghan Florian’s review of Whiskey & Ribbons for The Englewood Review of Books. Whiskey & Ribbons, Leesa Cross-Smith’s first novel, is a love story folded inside of a love story. It is a novel about grief, about family, about how we hold one another together when everything falls apart. The character […]
Wild Mountain
In Wild Mountain, Mona Duval has concocted a tidy life for herself in the rural town of Wild Mountain, Vermont. Escaped (mostly) from a bad marriage, she runs a general store next to an historic covered bridge—a bridge she loves so much, she literally wrote the book on its history. When an ice storm collapses the […]
The Handmaid’s Tale
I recently found a used copy of The Handmaid’s Tale at a local library book sale. In preparation for Hulu’s television adaptation I decided it was finally time to fill in this gap in my reading life, since I generally avoid watching screen adaptations of books I haven’t read. The timing was…well, not quite good, […]
Faithfully Feminist
“Survival is a creative act,” Erica Granados De La Rosa writes in her essay, “What Has Remained.” Survival is a creative act. And it is from such creation, and Creation, that the stories of Faithfully Feminist emerge. Faithfully Feminist is a collection of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian womyn speaking back at the question: why do […]
Something New
I love food. Growing it, cooking it, eating it, sharing it with friends. I also love to read, so it should come as no surprise that when I came across Lucy Knisley’s graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen I knew I had to have it. I picked up a signed edition at a conference, and Knisley had […]
The Humble Essay
As memoir has surged in popularity, this other beloved nonfiction form, the essay, seems to go in and out of style. Critics alternately lament the demise or herald the resurgence of the essay, and despite the wild success of recent volumes like Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, there are plenty of people ready to tell you that essay […]
Summer Reading Retrospective
This summer I set out to read only books by women. This was not hard to do, though I struggled once or twice to maintain my commitment when I came across the occasional intriguing title by a man. They could wait. I’ve spent most of my life reading books by men. Most of us have, […]
Citizen: An American Lyric
Those unfamiliar with the breadth of contemporary poetry may be surprised when they crack the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. A collage of prose poems, short essays, and images, Citizen often reads more like experimental nonfiction than poetry. None of this is to decry the book’s merits; on the contrary, it is smart, finely crafted, as […]
Bad Feminist
“In embracing the messiness of feminism as a lived, embodied thing, rather than stopping short with an abstract concept or ideology, Gay creates space to embark on a wider conversation, multivocal and multifocused, and always, always, always deeply human. She is honest, and she is brave with her words, even when there is much at […]
The Empathy Exams
Lately, every time I go online I see another article by or about Leslie Jamison. Her essay collection, The Empathy Exams, which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, was released this spring, and debuted at #11 on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a collection such as this garners so much attention, […]