My essay "If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap" (Brevity, September 2018) will be reprinted in Pushcart's annual anthology. When the email from Dinty W. Moore arrived yesterday, I read it more than a few times. More than a dozen, I think. It took that many readings to decode: "Your piece has been…
My whole career, twenty years now, has been in education. My love for and passion about writing—about all good writing and helping people figure out how to do it, no matter their purpose—partly overlaps with education and partly stands on its own. As a teacher, writer, shop daughter, and now a parent, I believe in…
Over a decade ago, I began writing a book, though I didn't know it at first. When I transitioned from elementary school teacher to graduate student, I began writing short pieces that led me to wonder about my meager childhood memory, study the nature of memory, and try to find lost memory. Eventually, I wrote…
My mother's chores always drew my sisters and me back to her house. Over a weekend a few years ago, while we proceeded through a lengthy list, I grew committed to one task: clean a corner of the basement floor. While at it, I sensed there was something bigger I was trying to scrub away,…
Though I grew up in a wooded part of Connecticut, I felt some nature shock when my husband and I bought a house here. Twenty-two years in apartments had offset the eighteen years I'd spent in my mother's home, which sat among the same tree types I'm looking at right now: hemlock, arborvitae, birch, oak,…
