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“I Couldn’t Believe I Wasn’t Alone”: Minna Dubin Talks MOM RAGE
When Minna Dubin published her essay “The Rage Mothers Don’t Talk About” in the New York Times in 2020, I shared it on Facebook, thankful for this stranger who had opened up about her experience as an...
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Accepted, Not Earned
After my daughter was born, I noticed a loose softness and a shapeless panic in myself where muscles and hardness used to be. The first night we took her home, she cried incessantly for hours while...
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“You Have to See People and Listen to Them”: Erin Williams on WHAT’S WRONG
Erin William’s graphic narrative Commute hit me hard. In the book, Williams unpacks memories of shame, addiction and recovery, and sexual assault through the analysis of the male gaze on a day’s...
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Unknowable Orbit: Poems
Poem of unknowing At first, I knew you better than anyone best. You were me and then you were you but I was me and we were the only two. Then you became you outside of me and I didn’t know you. We...
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She Wasn’t Ever Ours to Keep
Sitting across from our daughter who was with her “squad,” as she would come to call her eleven nieces and nephews, my partner Jody and I watched Crystel draw the children to her. She was a magician....
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“Grief Is Not Regret”: The Art of Pink Hair
I was in the midst of writing my new novel, Choose This Now, the first time I saw Caroline McAuliffe’s photograph Pink Hair from her Invisible Móðir series. Falling into the work’s acid colors and...
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Stories Stories: Laurie Frankel’s Adoption Novel, Family Family, is Neither...
India Allwood is a fictional character who makes a living playing fictional characters. A theater actress turned TV star, she often draws upon emotions from her time as a pregnant teenager who placed...
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Like a Heartbeat: An Excerpt from I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE
Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere (Ohio State University Press), about her search for her birth mother, their reunion, and their disunion. To read a Q&A with...
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“That Intersection is Everything”: Susan Kiyo Ito on Owning Her Adoption Story
Susan Kiyo Ito was born in 1959, smack in the middle of the “baby scoop era,” a time when closed, often coerced adoptions were standard, and it was common for parents to keep their children’s adoption...
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Still Blasts
People below move quickly, in straight lines, going the way they are going to the places that await them to do the things they have planned to do. Agency and autonomy transform them into moving dots,...
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Spilling Your Guts: Motherhood, Memoir, and What I Learned from David Sedaris
I say, Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. -Sharon Olds People talk about publishing a book using metaphors of gestation and birth. Publication day is your book baby’s birthday. But...
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It Breaks My Heart to Leave You Behind
We leave Detroit in the morning. The packed car whines up the I-75 highway bridge with Del Ray and the Detroit River to the left and a line of oil refineries out your window. I should be more excited...
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A Great Parenting Day
We entered the store to the refrain of “Don’t put pants on your heaaaaaaad! Don’t put pants on your heaaaaaad!” It’s amazing the way memories will upcycle through song when your companion is a...
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From Start to Finish
I’ve always been drawn to writing and used it to better understand myself. Writing was a passion of mine before I became a mother, and it remains a passion now. I started writing nonfiction pieces...
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r/howling
I make that first winter a diamond in my memory, something adamantine and buried safe in the dark earth. How new motherhood feels on me, like an animal skin I wear. The language of instinct is...
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Spice Up Your Life
A few days ago, your friend asked if she could list you as a reference on a job application, and you peppered a form with superlatives and specific, relevant examples of her wonderfulness. Talking up...
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Connecting the Dots of our Struggles: Widening Our Aperture from Individual...
Yesterday was my first day of childcare in four weeks. Which means: it’s been four weeks since I’ve last written. There exists a highly causal relationship between my childcare hours and my ability to...
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