Celebrating Resilience: My Essay “Warsaw” Featured in Eckleburg No. 22

My long-form essay, Warsaw, is published in Eckleburg No. 22, a literary and arts journal that publishes both emerging and celebrated voices. Warsaw tells the intergenerational story of my grandmother and mother, who made unimaginable choices to survive post-war Germany

This is how you say goodbye @ Longreads

This was our last conversation on earth. We went out laughing. We went out talking about ghosts, the shadows we leave behind. The body is gone. It was organic, composed of carbon molecules. But there are trees that live thousands of years. How do they do this? In Tasmania, there is a grove of King’s Holly that is thought to be 43,000 years old. They’ve survived by growing up, falling over, and starting again. A group of 47,000 Quaking Aspen in Utah, nicknamed the “Pando,” are all connected by a single root system. Scientists say, according to the trees’ genetic makeup, they could be a million years old.

ALFW’s East Coast Salon with a little help from our friends

AFLW East Coast Salon at KGB on May 30th.Writers: Jennifer Baker, Alison Kinney, Ysabel Y. Gonzalez, Michael J Seidlinger, Tobias Carroll, and Marnie Goodfriend. Also in attendance, Rosanna Arquette and friends.

The Bodhisattva @ The Nervous Breakdown

On Groundhog Day, I read that the movie, Groundhog Day, is considered a Buddhist meditation. My brother talked about it in the weeks before he died. He liked watching it, and liked comparing himself to the hero.

They Called Me Mrs. David Bowie @ Bust Magazine

People called me Mrs. David Bowie. I had my hair cut short just like his. I wore slinky pants, and platform shoes. I cross-dressed at gay bars in Chicago and Milwaukee. Was I a boy or a girl? He gave me a non-binary system of identity, and also poetry. And if he was from outer space, then so was I.

Heatwaves I’ve known and loved @ Entropy

Everything is green, too green. Even Demeter is dying. Here in Westchester, 20 years after the marriage ended, there’s a heat wave, and thunderheads in the still, blue sky. There’s a different kind of stink, not like the city, but still sweet. Things rot in this heat. Only yesterday, I finally took out the garbage, it was starting to ferment. This is the apotheosis of high summer. It is that space, where the wheel of the seasons is on the brink of shifting again. You can stand the heat, because the smell of things rotting is also the first sign of re-growth. Wallace Stevens wasn’t wrong, because the quiet death of all green things, in high summer, late July, is sweet.