I managed a ski shop awhile back. It was a fun, laid back, bro-talking industry – for a guy. But for a woman, it was an often sexist fight for recognition that wasn’t based on how tight my clothes were. Our mostly male customers seemed surprised I was...
I hung the lonely pirate today, on the wall in my office. My mom bought it for me when she and Henry went to the Farnsworth Museum the spring before she got sick. She bought it for me because she said she thought of me when she saw it. The pirate looks defeated and...
Mom asks me regularly about my writing, in that sort of soft, “I-don’t-want-to-scare-you-off-by-sounding-too-intense-about-this-so-I’m-going-to-pretend-I-don’t-care-much-but-I-really-think-it’s-important” voice. Because when your mother is a...
I grew up in the south end of Seattle during the seventies. My childhood home was on 38th street, a block made up of Black families, a Filipino family and two white families – mine being one of them. 38th street sat on the impoverished edge of Mt. Baker’s wealthiest...
“Perhaps you are still writing – if so I hope you surrender to it like a forbidden lover. I hope you steal time, skip work, hide out at the back table of a coffee shop, lie about your whereabouts, lose sleep, bag friends, and let your heart live what it...
