My voice climbed an invisible staircase until at the top step of my skull it jumped up and down and waved its arms in the air. “Wake up, mom! Wake up!” I said. ...
Considering most Latter-Day Saint missionaries build their faith on a manifestation of God and Jesus to a 14-year old boy in upstate New York, many young Mormon...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
*Featured Image by Rollin Jewett A few days after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I received a call from an organization ...
This is how the Holocaust ended for me, a solitary Polish-Jew liberated by American soldiers from the infamous death camp Mauthausen. I was at the time an emaci...
Formally coming out at 19 in the mid-’80s was a catastrophe ruled by fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear of HIV and AIDS. It was a panic that molded my life and ruled ...
Working with the bees, I am not just looking at the same insects my mother once looked at, I am also becoming her. I am lying down in her body and standing up. ...
I traveled between France and the United States every summer, and in France I was beautiful, and in America I was ugly and people told me so. Beauty as a cultur...
I step out of the water. I have not drowned. I am new, just born today. The scars that mark my body and my heart have not been rinsed away, but I feel so new an...
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Honorable Mention: Our Family Walks by Nick R. Robinson; unpublished manuscript.
Before my wife and I got married, my mother told me that my father had expressed concern about my future brother in law’s gayness being passed along to our chil...
Her admission that her diagnosis was terrible news showed a vulnerability in her I had never before witnessed. I had believed that nothing ever weighed on her,...
Right in the middle of some everyday activity, I’m overtaken by a sense of joy, peace, or contentment. The window often closes up just as quickly as it has ope...
My father and mother are trapped in this country, waiting for many years for permission to immigrate. Every six months he patiently goes alone to the Soviet Vis...
The practice of medicine is based on the physician’s ability to gather story from the patient. Our story is our human identity and our humanity. It is also the ...
After hip surgery, my father’s memory is all over the map. As he recuperates in rehab, he tells us he’s been to Spain, England, Oakland and even Kabul, all in t...
If I were a religious person, I would say something blessed me that day. But I’m not a religious person. Perhaps some part of me believed, as I still do, in the...
This is the place I remember—with its pine branches, hung like lace canopies. There is the rock slab where they took turns, each first pounding his chest, then ...
It wouldn’t be the last time I tried to cure a broken heart with recklessness.
*Featured Image: “MAGA (I Know Words, I Have The Best Words)” By Norton Pease 2017, Oil, enamel and glitter on canvas Pen 2 Paper By Mary Street Mis...
