I enjoyed this hybrid piece about ghosts. It's a short and fascinating read. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/09/16/all-you-have-to-do-is-die/ #GhostStories #ShortStory #PersonalEssay #HybridWriting #ghosts

"You are translating another funeral scene. There is sadness, yes, but there is also merriment, storytelling, music, and a kinetic energy that leaves the mourners rapt by the wonderment of life and the soul’s transition from this realm to the next." Nathan H. Dize for Words Without Borders

https://longreads.com/2025/01/16/translators-notes/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

"His hands moved quickly, the left switching between frets, the right strumming. He played several chords one after the other, weaving them together like strips of color in a cloth. Red, yellow, orange—major and primary and bright—and even a couple more lines—green and blue and minor—to create depth."

https://longreads.com/2025/01/16/the-charango/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

"The braid over my left shoulder filigreed with frost. Inside my mitten, water collected at my fingertips. Ravens flew dark against the sky." —Jessie Kindig for Orion Magazine

https://longreads.com/2025/01/15/object-relations/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

My essay "The Anxious Writer" just dropped at Breath and Shadow Magazine.

https://www.abilitymaine.org/bs2024fall/%22the-anxious-writer%22

“You are the public face of the company, a sentient billboard-cum-cash register, and your studied unspecialness—your ability to cede, to blend, to empty—is, in fact, your greatest strength.” —Emily Mester for Electric Literature

https://longreads.com/2024/11/27/kickers-journalism-writing-craft/

Jonah Walters on our attraction to disaster:

"We want to experience a big, cataclysmic, comprehensive change—a rip in the world—but we don’t want to be the reason for it. We can handle the challenge. What we can’t handle is the blame."

https://longreads.com/2024/10/24/iceland-volcano-disaster-jonah-walters/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

"A forensic scientist could take samples from my shoes and tell me how far I live from the coastline and what sort of lead laces the soil beneath my house. Like snails, we carry our homes with us."

For The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman writes about "home":
https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/there-is-no-place-like-home-whatever-that-is/

"Finally she asks, her voice trembling, 'Is he okay?' I tell her that it seems like he is. He’s writing under a tree. He’s wandering in Rome. We both cry a little."

For Jewish Currents, Palestinian artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi recounts a Zoom session with a medium: https://jewishcurrents.org/what-it-means-to-speak-with-the-dead

#writing #journalism #personalessay

https://miaq.substack.com/p/the-first-thing-i-said-to-my-father?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Mia’s Queue @mia-s-queue-mia

"I felt animated by delivering library access to incarcerated people, who are among the most marginalized. My intuition and empathy were assets here. My research training transferred, and I felt magical when I could quickly locate just what someone needed. A good book provided distraction; information, a lifeline." —Kasey Butcher Santana for Split Lip Magazine

https://splitlipthemag.com/memoir/0924/kasey-butcher-santana

"The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. . . . We don’t lend our voices to harmony. We buy our harmonies pre-sung in tidy plastic packages."

A beautiful #essay in Atmos by Jarod K. Anderson about reconnecting and harmonizing with #nature and #wildlife in a time of #depression: https://atmos.earth/my-harmony-with-the-heron/

"Although I never indulged in such rich foods at home, here I shed a few pounds — probably from all that walking weighted by groceries, but also because I had to eat less to feel satisfied. Each bite was so enjoyable, I didn’t need many of them. Deliciousness, I discovered, was more filling than deprivation." —Judith Sanders for Panorama Journal

https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-12-cities/cities-food-shopping-in-rome/

"But their real vocation appeared to be religion. My nonna and my babcia were so devout that they seemed like witches." —Victor Lodato for The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/05/my-mother-the-gambler

"I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me." —Diana Saverin

https://longreads.com/2024/07/25/predator-or-prey-diana-saverin/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

A quick read. Sorry about the paywall. "My Immortal Lifecycle":
https://daisybrain.medium.com/my-immortal-lifecycle-47f9129bd803

"I also had secrets that felt scary to say out loud. The fear of death was not the reason I couldn’t tell you about my sexuality, though at times it felt like the end of the world." For @longreads, Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen recounts coming out to her dad and growing up Vietnamese American.

https://longreads.com/2024/06/11/coming-out-vietnamese-american-jennifer-thuy-vi-nguyen/

#Longreads #PersonalEssay #Pride #FathersDay VietnameseAmerican

"I prolonged this moment, in which the darkness was so com­plete, more complete than I had ever experienced before, because I relished it." —Lydia Davis for The Yale Review

https://yalereview.org/article/lydia-davis-object-of-desire

"What does it mean, in the end, to describe a leaf when it may fork into many others? Instead, we describe ferns by the generations of their branching." —Wei Tchou for Virginia Quarterly Review

https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2024/05/little-seed

My personal essay “Saddles in the Kitchen” has been published by Redivider.

“In the 1970s, my family lived all over New Brunswick before settling down deep in the Appalachian hills of the Acadian forest. Every summer, we journeyed to Newfoundland to visit Dad’s family. I have snippets of memories from my infancy and early childhood. I recall being a baby on a plane with a smoking section, hoisted up to look over the rails of an icebreaker ferry called the William Carson….”

https://redivider.emerson.edu/saddles-in-the-kitchen/ @indigenousauthors #memoir #CNF #PersonalEssay #CanLit #WritingCommunity #ExJW #colonialism #religion #FamilyHistory #Inuit #Mikmaq #Beothuk #IndigenousMastodon #NativeMastodon #QueerLit #Newfoundland #Appalachia