Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up […]
Krista Stevens
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Quitting the Internet, Cold Turkey
The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”). But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Limits, or How to Avoid the Precipice Between Courage and Humility
I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Unapologetic Women
Diane Arbus, Uncropped: A Reading List
Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy.
Posted inQuotes
On Cancer: ‘Love wasn’t something I felt anymore. It was just something I did’
Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: “It’s everywhere,” he said.
Posted inQuotes
Nonviolence: The Right Answer to the Wrong Question
Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore—an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Loneliness and Isolation: Necessary Ingredients of Creativity?
(Vincent) Van Gogh likely had a cadre of mental issues, none of which were suitably diagnosed while he was alive. Yet what seemed to weigh heaviest on him was the inevitability of his loneliness. According to his letters to Theo, he felt he had one of two options: content himself with loneliness or try to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Rise of The Gender Novel: It’s Complicated
At The Walrus, Casey Plett calls for more depth in transgender characters in contemporary literature, arguing that cisgender authors writing sympathetic, yet trope-laden transgender narratives might be doing more harm than good. To get it out of the way: the Gender Novels fail to communicate what it’s actually like to transition. Their portrayals of gender-identity […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Hooah to All That: On Leaving NYC for a Writing Life in a Military Town
My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in […]
Posted inQuotes
Blast Force: The Invisible War on the Brain
After the First World War, family and friends said that sometimes, boys came back from overseas “not right in the head.” Nearly 100 years later, the American military is only just starting to understand the effects of bomb blasts on soldiers’ brains and the prescience of those casual observations. Caroline Alexander reports in National Geographic […]