Last I knew she was heading to Albuquerque to live with her father. The father who moved there months earlier with his new wife, the one who let us stay up late watching movies on the weekends when I often slept over. The same father …
The Lone Hero had a gun tucked in the waistband of his jeans. He had two more in the pockets of his leather jacket, and a small nickel-plated number in a nylon holster in his dusty boot. Weighing on his shoulder was a bazooka, the …
It was a cold and snowy December when I was handed the address of a “crack house” in one of the deserted and boarded up Detroit neighborhoods once inhabited by happy families whose sustenance was provided by good paying manufacturing jobs. The closing of the …
By seven-thirty, a posse of kids had cut loose the helium balloons. They floated up to the high ceilings and hung belly to belly, their tethers dangling just out of reach.
The first weekend of May, I attended Vortex, a three-day writers’ conference that took place at Whidbey Institute, on Whidbey Island, Washington. Organized by Hedgebrook, a leading organization helping women writers, Vortex is an annual event that celebrates women authoring change. During the conference, I was fortunate to lodge on site, on the property of Whidbey Institute, in a tiny cottage surrounded by tall evergreen trees and narrow trails that branched like sunrays, leading deeper into the forest.
