Elisabet Velasquez reckons with a lifetime of disharmony with her religious, mentally ill mother.
Feature
Posted inNonfiction
Dispatch from Puerto Nowhere
Robert Lopez examines what it means to be an assimilated American from Puerto Rico, and what was gained and lost in the process.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
How to Survive a Vivisection
After a traumatic experience with childbirth, Rachel Somerstein struggles to bond with her newborn daughter.
Posted inNonfiction
The (Loud) Soundtrack to My Struggle with Faith
After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Anna Gazmarian grapples with her evangelical upbringing, and finds solace in screamo music.
Posted inNonfiction
Queens of Infamy: Njinga
The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.
Posted inNonfiction
Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother
Peering into the mirror of her mother, Marcia Aldrich wonders whether she too is sentenced to dementia.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
To Love and Protect Each Other — From Bigotry
After Jay Deitcher sits silent as his wife is verbally assaulted by his father’s racist friend, he grapples with the ways his family has been muted by trauma.
Posted inArts & Culture, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera”
What happens when you’re not different just for the sake of being different.
Posted inNonfiction
‘People Can Become Houses’
In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
The Bread Thread
Emily Weitzman condemns the persistence of slut shaming over different stages in her life, and combats it with humor and…bread.