“I have no status inside or outside any clear borders unless I consider my mother’s uterus my original country.”
family history
Posted inEditor's Pick
Searching for Sleeper Trains
“Trains are still a part of my blood, my birthright. Through them I embrace my own kind of mobility and ambition, those two valued traits in my family line, if not quite manifested in the direction I’m heading.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Cresting the Wave
“A surfer comes to grips with a dark family secret born from the swells near Bob Hall Pier.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Grace: An Unfinished Draft, A Fire
“In Texas—Georgia—in Alabama—all over this vast canvas of fear that we call America, women will die. They won’t have time to run away. They will be great-Aunts only in name, and in death. And their deaths will disappear into a language made and remade by men to cover their shitty sins.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Searching for My Grandmother in The Heart Mountain Sentinel
Miyako Pleines explores the life of her grandmother within the pages of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, the newspaper of an internment camp for Japanese Americans.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
Sharing Food to Feed A Family’s Soul
Food feeds the body, but cooking for other people feeds human connections.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Heartbreaker
Beatrix M. Rooney discovers a tragic secret that may explain her brother’s descent into cruelty and violence.
Posted inHighlight, Quote Posts
‘The South Is Different Now. So Are We.’
On two tours of the South, taken 20 years apart, Pete Candler uncovers truths about his family and the place he comes from.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Itch and the Touch
Families are complicated. Caring for Grandpa John was even more so.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
God and Stone: One Woman Explores Her Armenian Roots
A young woman reconnects with her family’s ancestral home.