I first met Marty Ross-Dolen in spring of 2020 at an online introductory event for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) MFA in Writing program. We’d each been accepted into VCFA’s Creative Nonfiction program, with goals of working on…
As a lawyer with plenty of life experience, my mother should have known that lizards were a bad choice. Lizards are pets you cannot even pet. Touching them opens the risk of salmonella or something more sinister. Picking up…
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
The floodlights we found under my father’s workbench. I didn’t want to cut chemistry for the fourth time in two weeks, but Lee was the boss. Lee was Freddie Mercury, and I was only Brian May playing a tennis…
By the time Mama wakes up and Lolo steps outside, the calamansi is already in Gabe’s pocket. Gabe sits cross-legged in the dirt, palms empty. Lolo squints at the tree. “Everything is like this when no one’s looking.” “Like…
One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed…
Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back…
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
