ALREADY GONE / Print Anthology Contributor: “Held Under” (2023)
“My mother tells the story like this: she threw a glass of cold water in my five-year-old face while I was sleeping because an elderly neighbor, who’d read about the tactic in Woman’s Day, had suggested it as a way to rouse me because I was utterly impossible to wake up in the morning; because it’s what parents did back then and what did she know; because she was at her goddamn wit’s end.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES: “Tiny Love Stories” (June 7, 2022)
“My smile remains a tiny memorial to a kindly, skilled dentist I’ll never see again.”
PITHEAD CHAPEL / Nonfiction: “Wolfhound” (2022)
“When your family owned a wolfhound you lived in an attached house in Queens, with a postage stamp for a front lawn and seamed cement for a backyard, near busy streets and blocks of warehouses, with nary a grove of trees or open pasture anywhere in sight. This was not an ideal environment for a young child, let alone a dog that stood six feet high on its hind legs…”
SPRY LITERARY JOURNAL / Creative Nonfiction: “Hodges” (2022)
“In the seventies, when we’d visit my grandmother in Brooklyn, sometimes we’d drive near the housing projects that were built over sacred ground: Ebbets Field. I’d hold my hand out the window, trying to touch the air that those men once swung through, with ropy forearms and taut biceps, while clutching pine-tarred bats…”
JMWW JOURNAL / Creative Nonfiction:
“You Don’t Push the River” (2021)
“The Troubles were across the ocean, and yet we set a place for them at our Sunday table. There were so many ancient whispers, so many warnings in Celtic tongues and Brooklyn dialects…”
DOROTHY PARKER’S ASHES / Featured Essay: “Better Suited” (2021)
“I brushed past racks of linen blazers and sequined gowns at Lord & Taylor, feeling rudderless. I wasn’t exactly browsing. I was there to shop for a dead woman…”
OLDSTER MAGAZINE / “Humor” Column: “Just How ‘Lucky’ A Fellow Are We Talking About Here?”(2021)
“Dear Messrs. Emerson, Lake and Palmer:
I realize that back in the early ’70s when I was growing up, “Lucky Man” was a massive hit for you three. But after listening to the lyrics repeatedly for decades (mostly inadvertently, while standing in the supermarket checkout line), I’m sort of confused as to exactly how lucky this guy was…”
STREETLIGHT MAGAZINE / Blog: “Being Seen” (2021)
“We looked at each other for a few more seconds, and I said thank you and his eyes crinkled above his mask. We really saw each other for a moment, and I’m not sure that’s been happening to too many people for the better part of a year…”
READ650 Series: VOICES OF HOPE / Print Anthology Contributor: “Zooming Through It” (2021)
“It’s hard to sit down and write on any given day, but even more so during a pandemic…”
CRAFT LITERARY / Flash Nonfiction: “The Coat” (2020)
"This was clearly a gift for someone else, for another amalgam of a woman whom my father fancied. As I watched the coat sway over our heads, I realized what cruelty my father was capable of."
RANDOM SAMPLE REVIEW / Nonfiction: “That’s How You Lose” (2020)
“I rock my son and think of Joan Baez’s song lyrics, about her ex-lover Bob Dylan calling from a phone booth somewhere in the Midwest, about the long stretch of wires between them, about a halo of fluorescent light illuminating his form in the darkness….”
THE REAL STORY / Featured Essay:
“Crying is Pronounced Caoineadh in Gaelic” (2020)
“I’ve only seen my father cry a handful of times. There’s an immediate sense of betrayal in typing that sentence, and in exposing his vulnerability, because that’s not how we do things in my family. Keep your cards close to you, my father always told me, when we played gin rummy together on the living room floor. I shouldn’t be able to see your hand. Yet, that’s where writers so often need to go. We reveal. We search the room for the overarching tell…”
ANTI-HEROIN CHIC / Featured Essay:
“San Francisco Story” (2020)
“When I was a drugstore redhead with a pixie haircut. When we lived in San Francisco. When my jaw still sliced at my youthful neck, hinting at my mid country Irish DNA, and ended in a strong Celtic chin that jutted forward to order scotch neat and ask for matches…”
PENDEMIC: WRITING THE CURRENT PLAGUE / Guest Author:
“Communion” (2020)
“During this pandemic, whenever my throat tickles, or whenever I sniffle or feel sluggish, my psyche scrawls words on a massive chalkboard — words like intubation and ventilator, ground-glass lungs and dialysis, orphan and widower…”
LONGREADS / Featured Essay:
“The Sorrowful Mysteries, Or Reasons Why I’m No Longer Catholic” (2019)
“I am in kindergarten and I am kneeling on the seat of my desk chair. So are all of my Catholic school classmates. We are 4 and 5 and 6, and we stare at the crucifix hanging on the wall while our knees burn from the pain of prolonged contact and pressure against the blond, lacquered wood…”
NIGHTINGALE & SPARROW / Flash Nonfiction: “The Nature of Knowledge Itself” (2019)
“There was something unnatural in this stranger’s tender act towards my father— this woman, reaching over the brass-edged bar, letting her fingertips graze his stubbled face as she removed his glasses. Such vulnerability was uncharacteristic of my father—a jut-jawed Brooklyn boy whose eyesight would blur and lose focus without his visual aid, leaving him defenseless with his back to the barroom door…”
RIVER AND SOUTH REVIEW / Nonfiction: “The Line Drive” (2019)
“When the ball made contact with the glass, there was a thud and a pop, followed by a sudden tickle of air at my neck and an intensity of ambient outside noise. Then, gleaming shards of glass surrounded me, jewels and gemstones of error scattered across the leather interior…”
STREETLIGHT MAGAZINE / Guest Post: “Vena Amoris” (2019)
“When he put this ring on my finger, my skin was smoother, and more supple. My hand was thinner, and less freckled than it is now. When he asked me to marry him, he got down on one knee in front of the London flat where he had once lived, and where our love had blossomed—when we were both study-abroad college students living on Dunhills and half-pints of lager and takeaway curry fries, and falling outrageously in love with each other…”
PIDGEONHOLES / Nonfiction:
“The Comfort of Sameness” (2019)
“Each night, my mother recited the “Our Father” while my father remained silent beside her. He was a reluctant parishioner since the mid-sixties advent of Vatican II within the Catholic Church. My father had no use for the modern-day retelling of Catholicism, with its 70s-era, rainbow-guitar-strapped folk masses, its kisses of peace offered by pew mates who thought nothing of cutting him off in the church parking lot after the liturgy. He preferred the solemnity of ancient rituals known to him since childhood…”
MOTHERWELL MAGAZINE / “Persistence” Column: “36 Life Decisions I Don’t Regret, Even Now” (2018)
“1. To take a punch in the stomach at age eight or nine, and not tattle about it, or even cry when it happened. To suck in the surrounding air and curl into myself, yet still somehow remain upright, until the pain passed over me. My assailant, another kid, was stunned at my stoic reaction — which allowed me to lord that punch over him for years…”
SONORA REVIEW / Issues 73-74: Frenzy/Future / Nonfiction: “Intercession” (2018)
“The priest would arrive, amidst the flurry of phonics workbooks and clapped eraser dust, carrying a small black-handled case. My classmates and I looked on in reverent silence, while Father eased into the slat-backed oak chair ceremoniously placed at the front of the classroom, and unsnapped the case’s gleaming latches…”
THE SUNLIGHT PRESS / Creative Nonfiction: “Think Happy Thoughts” (2018)
“I wanted my father to love me as much as he loved Judy Collins, as much as old Basil Rathbone and Jimmy Cagney movies, as much as he loved Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless, as much as Sunday afternoon re-runs of “F-Troop” and “Mission: Impossible,” as much as hard packs of Marlboros and drives on the New York State Thruway, with hibachi grills rattling around in the trunk, as much as whiskey, and as much as beer…”
THE MANIFEST-STATION / Guest Post: “Writing About Us” (2017)
“I’d been writing since I sensed the pull of words — somewhere around age 4. Not short stories, of course, but angular, awkward attempts at words — and their accompanying stick-figure illustrations — to highlight my frustrating attempts at communication. In our Queens apartment, my mother would find torn envelope flaps, seventies singer-songwriter album sleeves, and my parents’ own high school yearbooks, all adorned with my pencil-scratch efforts at language.”
MY BODY, MY WORDS / Print Anthology Contributor: “A Timeline of Human Female Development” (2016)
“1976: During the bicentennial, girls across America play Betsy Ross at school pageants. They sit silent, miming sewing motions, and decorate the stage. Boys are given the role of George Washington in these plays. They win the Revolutionary War. They recite important speeches and become the first president of the United States…”
CREATIVE NONFICTION / ISSUE 59 - “MARRIAGE” / Nonfiction: “How You Know” (2016)
“Marry the man who makes an effort, late on Christmas Eve, to roll the socks tightly into colorful spirals, like cake frosting rosettes, and who places them in a bundled bunch at the bottom of your stocking, so that the giant sock looks just as it did when you were little on Christmas morning -- overfilled, bursting and magical. He can't afford to give you that much, and he knows that you don't want much to begin with. But he wants you to give you the felted memory of childhood, on special mornings like this…”
VELA MAGAZINE / Featured Essay: “What We Write About When We’re Not Writing” (2016)
“When you can’t write, you write lists. To-do lists. Reading lists. Life lists. Lists of things to be repaired or fixed. Packing lists. Shopping lists. You write longhand in tight, tiny letters that you need paper towels, eggs, butter, apples, chicken breasts, and spinach…”
FULL GROWN PEOPLE / Creative Nonfiction: “4x6, 5x7, 8x10” (2016)
“My father doesn’t want the pictures anymore. When he finds them in drawers or old shoeboxes, he passes them on to me—in used mailing envelopes bearing his new address, or in secondhand shopping bags printed with the names of retail stores long defunct, with curlicued fonts that spell names like “Bambergers” or “Gimbels.” When he does so, I am struck by the incongruence of my childhood memories, grouped together in no particular order…”
RIVER RIVER / Prose: “Rimmed in Life” (2015)
“These mountains encircle me like older brothers, gentle fathers, and treasured ancestors. They are always familiar. The range is a sight line I knew as a small child, when my parents and I traveled from Queens on weekends — to grill hibachi burgers or walk near streams at state parks, and to feed the llamas at the Catskill Game Farm…”
MAMALODE / Creative Nonfiction: “Somebody Really Cared” (2015)
“A few weeks ago, I ducked into a taxi along Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and instructed the cabbie to take me to Fifth Avenue and 50th Street. “You want the church side?” he said. Hearing vestiges of a lapsed Queens accent in my verbal request, he asked a question that only a native New Yorker could answer…”
MCSWEENEY’S INTERNET TENDENCY: “Snowstorms, Then and Now” (2014)
“THEN: Walk around in your overheated city apartment in a bra, your boyfriend’s boxers, cute cable-knit socks, and a hat, because your boyfriend thinks it’s adorable. Drink more wine. Make out on the couch under a Downy-scented, monogrammed fleece throw blanket that your college roommate gave you as an “apartment-warming” gift. Have lots of sex.
NOW: Walk around the house in ski jacket, hat, and gaitors, because you’ve already run back and forth to the store sixteen times and can’t wring the ungodly dampness out of your middle-aged, sorry-ass bones…”
LITERARY MAMA / Creative Nonfiction: “Haru-Haru” (2014)
“A rush of chlorine and humid air permeates my nostrils as we enter the swimming area of our local YMCA. The chemical odor still unnerves me, even though I’ve been a visitor at this pool for several years…”
FAMILY FUN MAGAZINE / “Parenting” Column: “Fostering a Love of Music” (2014)
“Some days, when my children can't rouse themselves from sleep, I crank up the classic rock. After a few bars of "I'm So Tired" or "I'm Only Sleeping," they moan and complain, but only briefly—because it's the Beatles, after all, and no one can stay angry when John, Paul, George, and Ringo are on the scene…”
BRAIN, CHILD / Guest Post: “Why I Worry About Twelve” (2013)
“I was a city kid, although it never occurred to me to think of myself that way. We were simply where we were, where generations had lived before us, and where we always expected to be from. We weren’t tough kids living in the south Bronx, in Washington Heights or Jamaica. But we were all harder and wiser than we knew ourselves to be. All of us were. Every single one of us who called a New York City borough their home…”
THE RUMPUS / “Funny Women” Column: “Behind Every Great Man” (2012)
“To the left is a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule, as found in a book. Below is what I imagine Mrs. Franklin’s daily schedule looked like.
5:00 – 7:00 a.m.: Rise, wash Ben’s clothing, feet, and ass; powder Ben’s wig; chop wood for cooking breakfast; feed and clothe Ben’s illegitimate son from one of his many affairs; milk cows; feed chickens and collect eggs; tend to garden; wash linens; repair feather bed; darn socks…”