The dust specks only dance for the light I allow them. I am the sole curator of this self-inflicted museum, responsible for its quiet and its failures. I look at my own wrist, not as skin and bone, but as a blueprint carrying a design I did not ask for. My body is a brittle,…
To who I became on December 17th, 2009For you are never a foster child from the very start.I wish to dedicate this piece to every person who got lost in the fostercare system and more so the ones who never found their way out.There is a way for you and you are not alone. You…
There are minds that walk through the world with a kind of untroubled acceptance, registering events as they occur and allowing them to remain uncomplicated in every day life. And then there are minds like mine that hesitate, return, and reevaluate every minor action, decision, and thought. These minds live not in the first perception…
Most people think Wicked is the liberating, feminist corrective to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. I think it does the opposite. For all its emerald-green shimmer, Wicked strips away one of the earliest feminist role models in American children’s literature: Glinda the Good, as Baum actually wrote her. And for the readers who…
I’d been with Ignacio for a year when it was time to introduce him to my storage unit. We were doing the thing where you move in together just a few months before getting married. After the divorce from my first marriage, I’d put my things away in an air-conditioned storage and bounced around for…
The second half of the 19th century found Europe in a precarious position. The Christian faith faced continued assaults from major developing forces. Rapid industrialisation and mass production through machines took away the value previously placed on the unique potential of a human. Imperialism reduced religion to a tool to justify the oppression of the…
In the third chapter of her book, The Reading Figure in Irish Art in the Long Nineteenth Century, Tricia Cusack records a pivotal scene from a short story by Sarah Grand (73–74). Grand, a prominent, late-nineteenth-century women’s rights activist in Ireland, captures one possible reaction to “the New Woman,” in her story, “The Undefinable” (73)….
Your work is really marketable, you know, with the #MeToo movement and all. Yes, a male poetry professor actually said this to me my first semester in a MFA creative writing program. In hindsight, one goal of every MFA from a technical standpoint is to create authors that are marketable. More money equals bigger names…
‘Indeed, the moment an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dumb or amazing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman’. 1 For the enfant terrible, that young and particular breed of artist, commerce is not an area of…
Introduction Silence is often misunderstood as emptiness—a lack of words, a gap in the narrative, an unfinished conversation. Yet, in literature, silence is never empty. It is deliberate. It carries weight, tension, and meaning that words alone cannot hold. Writers across centuries have used silence as a powerful narrative device: to express what characters cannot…