Save the children. Save the world. Start with one child. That child. The invisible one. Or the loud one. The awkward one. The one whose smirk and sneer builds walls. The one whose smile bends like a question at your Good Morning. That one. And then that one. Give them a book. Give them a …
A grizzled, gap-toothed man asks to break a twenty for his bill. I keep all m’fives, he tells the waitress. The man at the counter laughs. I like keeping all my money, too. Naw, the fives. He holds a bill aloft. The ones with E. When I was little and loud, my favorite word was, …
Despair choked. Cultivated joy. Harvested peace. *****
September 8, I returned to my classroom for only the second time since Covid closed my district mid-March. The first time occurred early June, when my colleagues and I returned to help empty student lockers and reunite their contents with the kids who’d been abruptly forced to abandon them. Administration allowed us a few minutes …
On my first first-day of school, I was four and my mother walked me down Torresdale Avenue to the playground preschool where I would learn how to color and paint and cut with big girl scissors. Skills I needed along with sharing and taking turns, as I already knew how to read and write and …
I hate to dream. I dream in color and minute detail. In patterns of setting, plot, and genre. Their characters are archetypes, not familiars. Their conflicts encoded metaphors for my waking life. Vivid dreams, in other words. Subconscious manifestations of external turmoil, they are a nightly phenomena with which I have been intimately acquainted even …
The venetian blind Lady Liberty at the heart of “Bring Me Your Yearning” actually existed. In 1986, two days before the 100th anniversary of New York’s original Statue, she mysteriously appeared overnight in the middle of the Susquehanna River near my childhood home of Dauphin, Pennsylvania, seven miles north of the state’s capital. Her origins …
Save the children. Save the world. Start with one child. That child. The invisible one. Or the loud one. The awkward one. The one whose smirk and sneer builds walls. The one whose smile bends like a question at your Good Morning. That one. And then that one. Give them a book. Give them a …
(*WARNING: the following contains spoilers for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner) By now you should have read through chapter twelve of The Kite Runner. And please don’t tell me you’ve read when you haven’t. I’ve been doing this a long time and I can tell, especially with this book which contains so many deftly plotted …
FOCUS. And no, its selection has nothing to do with the visual connotation of 2020, though I do appreciate the symmetry. Rather, its selection logically follows my 2019 word, SPEAK. A little context… I’ve been a writer almost as long as I’ve been a reader, but writing–and finding the time to do it well–has almost …
My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann 