New nonfiction at Vol. 1 Brooklyn: "The Edge of Thirteen"

Really thrilled to have my essay "The Edge of Thirteen," in Vol. 1 Brookyn.

"The warning signs that Stevie Nicks may not have been an ethereal, free-spirited gypsy from the velvet underground were there. I just chose not to see them. When you’re young, everyone in a position of authority seems kind, affirming of you, and, most importantly, wise. Until suddenly, they aren’t. Maybe they molest you or beat you or ignore you while they’re trying to find your next stepmother or stepfather. Maybe they tell you the benevolent God that they pray to every night for salvation is sending you, specifically, to hell because Pat Robertson told them so. Or maybe they’re a drug addict. 

Stevie Nicks, to my horror, was the latter." 

To read more, go here.

Don't Kill Your Darlings

I have an essay today at Women Writers, Women's Books about not killing your darlings. Thanks to Barbara Bos and her excellent crew for letting me contribute!

"Often we cling to our darlings because we lack confidence in our own abilities (“I’ll never write something so fantastic again—how could I?”). However, by doing so, we’re both challenging ourselves to create another, more beautiful darling and proving that, yes, we are capable of another darling—many more, in fact.

So they say. Between us, I’ve never actually killed my darlings."


To read more, go here.

"The Hard Truths" at The Nervous Breakdown

I have this essay at The Nervous Breakdown on writing about controversial subjects in fiction: 

"If I do have a responsibility to my readers, it’s to be the best spokesperson for my characters, to make them as fully realized as possible, to discover their hard truths and not shy away from them."

To read more, go here.

New Post at Medium: I Saw the Sign

"Everyone knows the signs. There are hundreds of books, websites, videos, dedicated to them: flickering lights, unexplained touches, items in the house disappearing, temperature changes in the room, dreams visits, audible hallucinations, shadows. The list goes on and on of ways that your loved ones are attempting to contact you from beyond the land of the living, letting you know they’re okay. In the almost two years since my mother died, I’ve never seen a sign. " 

 To read more, go here.

Five Novels That Influenced Me as a Writer

Some books you return to over and over again, not only because you love them, but because they altered your direction as a writer the moment you read the first few sentences. Today at Rainbow of Books, I discuss five such books that altered the course of my writing life. 

Every line is a carefully arranged flower in a bouquet. Roy taught me that every line, every word is important, just like every cell in our bodies, every organ, has a purpose (except maybe the appendix).  

To read more, go here.

New Anthology: The House That Made Me

Excited to see my name in Publishers Weekly! I have a essay, "Where We're Going, Where We've Been" in this great collection of essays, The House That Made Me, edited by Grant Jarrett. Authors include Porochista Khakpour, Pamela Erens, Laura Miller, Tim Johnston, Roy Kesey, and so a ton of others. Here is a snippet of the review. You can also read it here.

"The essays strike a variety of tones, including curiosity, ambivalence, thoughtfulness, and earnestness. Some writers emphasize the conceit of looking at their old homes from the vantage point of a satellite. Ru Freeman and Jen Michalski, in their pieces, discuss what can be seen and what is missing in the pictures, as well as what is impossible to capture. Jeffery Renard Allen and Pamela Erens return to Chicago’s North Side and South Side, respectively, to capture different aspects of the city. Other writers take readers to California, Canada, New York, and Sri Lanka. Some reexamine their families, while others consider the fragility of memory. All of the essays show, in their own ways, how homes make us and how we attempt to make homes for ourselves, at least in memory. Some readers may well be inspired to take similar journeys into the past." ―Publishers Weekly

"Thank You, 2015" at Medium

A small essay on why I'm grateful for 2015 today at Medium:

"Thank you, 2015, for a grateful year. I am grateful for loss, because it’s made me thankful for what I have. I am grateful for personal rejections I’ve received, for they’ve made me have to love myself more..."

To read more, go here.

The Anniversary Gift: What I Learned a Year After My Mother’s Death

I have a new essay today in Medium, "The Anniversary Gift: What I Learned a Year After My Mother’s Death":

A numbness, a void, had grown over my pain, burying me deep underneath. But slowly, the silk began to loosen, and someone different emerged from the cocoon. Before my mother died, I was a scared person, a worried person. I worried about what people thought of me; I was afraid to make a mistake, to be less than perfect. I felt responsible for everyone and everything and spent an inordinate amount of energy trying to fix broken people, fucked-up situations, to make myself indispensable. My entire self-worth was tied up in this belief. In that deep void, however, I discovered that the person I’d been neglecting all these years was me.

To read more go, here.

New Essay in Medium: Gone Girl

I have a new essay, "Gone Girl," in Medium:

Grief is a terrible lesson in being present, locked in the pain of immediate loss. Each day is unique in its presentness and pain, predictable in its presentness and pain.

To read the essay, go here.

New essay at Medium

Over at Medium, I wrote about my ambivalent relationship with my cat Scout, and how I came to terms with it:

Life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump once said. You never know what you’re gonna get. We often think we deserve accolades for mere intentions: for opening our doors to abandoned pets, for signing on to raise children for 18 (or sometimes 25 or 30) years of our lives. But what happens when something goes wrong, when we get a seemingly spoiled chocolate, or one to which we’re allergic? How we deal with unmet expectations is the mettle of who we are, not our good intentions. And we can never know who we are until we encounter a situation in which we are forced confront the existence of our lesser selves, the ones who want to throw in the towel, pout, be angry at life’s unfairness, and not follow through on our commitments.

To read more, go here.

Living the Dream

I dreamed that my mother and I were shopping in a boutique store. We dabbed perfume on our wrists from something resembling a Crabtree & Evelyn display. To my subconscious disappointment, the perfume had no scent. (I had hoped my mother was sending me a message from beyond the grave.) Suddenly a bunch of refugees from another planet came into the store. They were white, of Scandinavian-looking descent. A village people, perhaps. They just wanted to go home, they explained, but Chakotay from Star Trek Voyager had the unenviable task of explaining to them they'd lived their life in a simulation, they were refugee holograms from the Enterprise's holodeck, and this would be their reality now. We all boarded a train. Two older women, their white hair drawn back in ponytails, comforted each other. One kissed the other on the lips, and I could feel her cold, small lips on my own.

My mother and I were sad for the refugees. What difference did it make that their life was a dream? If they were happy there, why couldn't Chakotay send them back to the holodeck? Why couldn't I stay here in my own dream, where my mother was still alive and we did the things we liked?

I remember learning about Descartes ("I think, therefore, I am") and the "brain in the vat" as a freshman in college. Later in life, I've read the Toltecs and the Buddhists, and modern "philosophers" who posit that our lives are our own creation, that God is in inside and our beliefs determine our lives. But can we really design the life we want, free of pain, of suffering? Can we really live in a dream? Is it all in how one views oneself, one's life, or is it something greater?

Some days I wish I never had to wake up from my dreams. What difference would it make that they weren't real? Who can say this waking life is?

Winter Fruit

the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
—"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman

When you're younger, the bad things that happen almost seem an anomaly, so rare they are between moments of great wonder and the luxury of youth—the friend who commits suicide or dies in a car accident, an older relative stricken with cancer, a beloved pet passing. But sometime in your forties the fat, succulent sun that's been warming your face, although not as strongly as it did in your twenties, dips under the horizon line almost completely, and suddenly what was once anomaly becomes a pattern, happens more often than it doesn't. One day you wake up and realize you've had the same pain in your knee for weeks that you assumed would go away, for it always did before, but didn't. The possibly occurs to you that it might never go away, that the pain is your new reality, along with the throb on your little finger. That because your mother died last year doesn't mean that you'll receive a multi-year reprieve on grief, that in fact many people close to you may become ill, or even die, within months or years of other tragedy. You may put down several pets in the space of a few months. You may have your own health scares while worrying about others.

Living in the bittersweet twilight, knowing that the small, hard oranges will probably outweigh the ripe ones from this point onward, and how to savor the juice from the few that you do find. Or, as that wise sage John Mellencamp once said, "They say life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."

I Am Superman

I have been reading a lot about how codependent people find an immense need to take care of other people, trying to fix them, the way they attract equally broken lovers and friends, whether they are women (or men) incapable of loving themselves or others, people who are eternal victims, covert narcissists and cluster B personality types, those with repressed homosexual tendencies, and it's all the things I've always read, but the thing that always puzzled me was the reason why—why do we invest so much energy trying to "help" other people other than ourselves? What is so terrible about my own inner life that I seem determined to focus on others and keep constantly busy in my waking life? After all, I am not scared of pain. I have emotions, and unlike some, am not afraid to feel them. Unlike some, I am not afraid to admit I'm wrong, an imperfect creature, and find ways to improve. From what am I running away?

I dreamed last night about being in a sporting goods store (probably because of my waking difficulty in finding a pair of running shoes that is functional and not extremely ugly—let's face it, running shoes have gotten way out of hand that way) looking for a new football or soccer ball or tennis racket or sneakers, I don't know know. I was hanging out with two women friends (who I adore in waking life, and who serve as a reminder to me that I am doing something right, that I do attract wonderful things into my life), and maybe we were getting ready for a party. I was suddenly in my mom's house. In the dream, she had moved to Baltimore for "treatment" for addiction, and before she succumbed to it, lived in a kind-of seedy part of Baltimore. There were so many things she had crammed into this house, things that brought her joy, one of which was a antique card rack, that kind that holds greeting cards. Every year in the dream, she'd take out all the holiday cards she'd saved and display them on this huge card rack, and I wondered whether I should take these things home with me, continue the tradition. My mother had a lot of trinkets, things she'd like to display, her own version of paradise, a visual reminder to be happy. I admire her ability to decorate, to always make a place look alive and happy to see you. It's a part of me that, living with a more minimalist partner, I have suppressed (and probably for the best—less to dust).

But I don't want to live my mother's life, the same way I don't want to employ her survival, her coping tactics in my own. My mother's coping mechanism to deal with my father's alcoholism was to drink, drink, drink, and essentially become an alcoholic herself. In the dream, I realized I was furious. Furious that I had two parents who passed along terrible survival skills, who made me feel like, in some way, taking care of people was being loved, that love was being needed (or, conversely, that love was pity, and that the more broken you were, the more attention you would get). Love is not being needy, being needed, or giving to someone else until you can't, and then giving some more. Love is being your own beautiful person, being happy. Loving yourself and being your own partner, mother, father, and if you are lucky or inclined, being with people who appreciate and honor you exactly as you are.

In the dream, I began to throw things, break things, scream. Vases, crystal figurines, books. I raged and screamed my head off that I had spent half my life caught in this vicious cycle of feeling undeserving of love unless I gave myself up to a friend, or a lover, or a parent, like a slave. And I realized what I had been running away from—terrible anger. In a story I wrote called "The Queen of Swords," a young girl opens a store where people can come in and smash things, get it out of their system. She supplies the objects and cleans everything up when they're done. I've often wished I had such a store to visit, and here was my dream world, offering one to me.

I am torn between what's mine in me, and what is the result of environment, upbringing. I am torn about what to honor. I am torn that I am angry when for most of my life I have thought I have been so calm, hidden, reserved. I don't want to be angry; I don't see the point in being angry about the past. How do I let go of all this emotion that flared up in my dream? Is it gone now, or does truly letting go of an emotion require a future action, ie, acting differently when a similar situation occurs, such as when a needy, broken person is attracted to my orbit like some moth, is letting go of the past and that anger involve my denying them entry, walking away, cutting my losses, no matter how much I think I have invested? Is it being a "selfish" person, putting my needs in front of everyone else's, of letting people figure out their own problems, carry their own baggage? And what do people who put away the cape, what do they do in their Clark Kent lives, for there is an incredible allure in thinking you're invincible, that you can carry hearts of so many, be their catcher in the rye?

Maybe without the cape, you can still fly.

The Intruder

I dreamed that we were young, nine or ten, and in the old house. A terrible commotion jolts me out of sleep.

I think someone broke into the house, I say to my brother. We have convened in the tiny bathroom that we share with our parents. The window is open and I can feel cool air breathing around us.

I'll get dad. My brother turns to leave.

Don't. I grab his arm. He won't do anything.

You want to get Mom? His eyes widen. Our preference is Mom, for everything, but not for something like this.

No. All right. We stand by my father's side of the bed, and my brother shakes him.

Dad, I whisper. You need to wake up and call the police. We think someone is in the house.

Go back to bed, he murmurs. Our father is dismissive of most of our worries, awake or sleeping.

Dad. My brother shakes him again. I stand in the hallway as my brother apprises my father, who is now sitting on the rim of the bathtub in the bathroom, of the situation.

It's nothing. My father is bent over, the weight of sleep and possibly alcohol on him. Probably the trees or something.

We're going to check it out, I announce boldly, forcing my father's hand. My brother and I creep down the stairs and into the kitchen. The back door has been forced open. It's cooler and breezier here. I stand at the top of the stairs. The intruders have to be hiding in the basement.

I'm just going to go. I announce my impulsive, risk-averse plan. Something that will plague me for the rest of my life, someone inside me thinks. They'll hear me and leave out the basement door.

I run down the stairs to the basement. The front room, to my relief, is empty. As I creep toward the back room, I notice the door to the outside is still shut. Maybe they have already left, through the kitchen door. But maybe they're still here, hiding in one of the small alcoves—the room where my father has his tool shop, the other where the washer and dryer are. I stand with my brother in front of the accordion doors that house the washer and dryer. The doors are open about a foot, easy enough for someone to slid through and hide behind.

We hear my father milling around in the kitchen. Maybe we feel braver. Maybe we are pissed that he has let us come down here all by ourselves, in harm's way, and we might as well finish the job. He has always left us to fend for ourselves, in one way or another, whining mightily about everything before eventually doing it, but not without making us feel incredibly guilty for even asking. My brother and I look at each other. We don't need him. We never did. He's holding us back.

My brother suddenly darts into the crack in the accordion doors. Upstairs I hear my father say I wish this didn't happen. It is then, as the accordion door opens further that I see the teenage boy, the one who hung out up at the baseball fields smoking on his BMX bike and never up to anything good. We had bragged to him about my father's extensive model car collection in the stairwell by the washer and dryer. He has more toys than us, my brother had explained. I wonder if he has come to steal them. It makes sense that this boy and my father would be interested in the same, stunted things: cars, cigarettes, alcohol.

There is a flash in the boy's right hand. A knife. He sticks it into my brother's gut for what I know is a fatal stab. I pull the accordion door in front of the boy and start punching him repeatedly through it. I know that my brother is going to die and I am going to kill this boy. I feel his skull crack under my fists through the accordion door before I startle awake.

In my dreams, the basement of our childhood home is always my subconscious, and the dreams feel very real—I can feel temperature, air, weight. In real life, my brother and I could never count on our father. We learned all the things a father would have taught us through our mom's father or (poorly) by ourselves. I never felt I was harmed by it—maybe I'm still worried that my brother is experiencing the effects of this paternal negligence (whereas I am, on cue, just angry). But we are adults now. The sins of the father are long gone. It's interesting what one's inner child still holds onto, what plumes out of our subconscious just a genie in a bottle when we are stressed or on the cusp of important decisions or forks in our life.

Essay in Psychology Today: "How I Wrote My Way Out of the Closet"

I have a new essay up at Psychology Today called "How I Wrote My Way Out of the Closet." I think the title speaks for itself. I hope you enjoy it:

The conversation was one of the hardest of my life and didn’t go the way I’d written it, but somehow, seeing the words on the page was comforting—they were solid, firm, ready to back me up should I waver. I had written them, and they could never be erased.

To read more, go here. Thanks to editor Jennifer Haput for believing in my work!