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In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing. The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. "I know this feeling," she writes. "We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place." Casey's willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of "guardian to the lost."
Twice declared extinct, North America's most endangered mammal species, the black-footed ferret (BFF), is making a comeback thanks to an evolving conservation regimen at more than thirty reintroduction sites across the continent. Lawrence Lenhart lingers at one such site in his proverbial backyard, the Aubrey Valley in northern Arizona. He clocks hundreds of hours behind the wheel, rolling over ranch ruts as he shines a spotlight over dusky sage steppe in the hopes of catching a fleck of emerald eyeshine. The beguiling weasel at the center of this book is more than a charismatic minifauna; it is the covert ambassador of a critical ecosystem that has dwindled to 1 percent of its former size. ...
My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert that reflects upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life. The essays chronicle times of interruption and then adaptation as the disability skill of always just figuring it out becomes tested with age and with illness. Throughout the book, Lambert engages with topics of ageism and ableism through storytelling...
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah’s ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation...
Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl’s present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God’s first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming. The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constrain...
As founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and architect of the genre, Lee Gutkind played a crucial role in establishing literary, narrative nonfiction in the marketplace and in the academy. A longstanding advocate of New Journalism, he has reported on a wide range of issues—robots and artificial intelligence, mental illness, organ transplants, veterinarians and animals, baseball, motorcycle enthusiasts—and explored them all with his unique voice and approach. In My Last Eight Thousand Days, Gutkind turns his notepad and tape recorder inward, using his skills as an immersion journalist to perform a deep dive on himself. Here, he offers a memoir of his life as a journalist, editor, husband...
Immigrant children first speak the language of their mothers, and in Toledo, Ohio’s Little Syria neighborhood where Joseph Geha grew up, the first place he would go to find his mother would be the kitchen. Many of today’s immigrants use Skype to keep in touch with folks back in the old country but in those “radio days” of old before the luxuries of hot running water or freezers, much less refrigeration, blenders, or microwaves, the kitchen was where an immigrant mother usually had to be, snapping peas or rolling grape leaves while she waited for the dough to rise. There, Geha’s mother took special pride in the traditional Syro-Lebanese food she cooked, such as stuffed eggplant, len...
The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as Cris Mazza searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. Mazza’s story contains many of life’s expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identities—child, student, partner, “successful” author. Some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo incidents; “hoo...
Prodigals, a memoir inessays, explores the life of Sarah Beth Childers'swildly creative brother, who committed suicide at twenty-two, and her life with him and after him, through the lens of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. This book examines the ways Childers's brother's story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the archetype of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences.Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountain...
Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the two erasures of Esta Plat. Murdered in Ukraine by Nazi troops in 1942, evidence of the life of Esta Plat was preserved in a bundle of her letters until the letters were tossed into a dumpster and destroyed. Haunted by the inheritance of survivor's guilt and shame in a family that kept no Old World keepsakes except her grandmother's one-sentence memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varonis compelled to sift through records of Europe's genocidal past. Pitting grandiose Holocaust memorials against the act of bearing witness, Varon confronts the limitations of history, folklore, archival data, and survivor testimonies. Seeking solace in ritual, she challenges her up...