Fifty Miles by Sheryl St. Germain
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...
Category: Loss
10 Minute Read/Girls & Women/Grief/Health/Loss/Memoir/#MeToo/MeToo/nonfiction/Rape Culture/#SAAM/trauma/2018 #MeToo Selected Shortlist Essay
Smeared by Rachel Carson
"Did you know some hospitals have an entire department dedicated to rape victims?"
5 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Girls & Women/Loss/Memoir/#MeToo/MeToo/nonfiction/Rape Culture/The Life/trauma/2018 #MeToo Selected Shortlist Essay
Blowjobs by F. M. Walsh
We avoid their touch by pissing our pants on purpose. Boys don’t want to fondle girls who piss their pants. Fucking babies. We hide. We find a way out of the wo...
7 Minute Read/Black Memoirs Matter/Girls & Women/Literature/Loss/MeToo/nonfiction/Rape Culture/2018 #MeToo Selected Shortlist Essay
Relax by Katharine Bost
I want to shout that I had only had one beer. I want to jump back in the cab and pray that the driver takes me home even though I don’t have any cash for him. B...
5 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Childhood/Escape/Family/Girls & Women/Grief/Identity/Literature/Loss/Memoir/Mommy Dearest/nonfiction/PTSD/Secrets/The Life/trauma
They Don’t Live in Dallas by Anna Mullins
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
Going to Find by David Hensley
I was in the kind of love that puts a rock in your heart and stuffs your eyes with cotton, but you hold that rock and that cotton. Because that’s all you’ve got...
3 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Health/Institutions/Literature/Loss/Memoir/MeToo/Mental Health/nonfiction/On Memory/PTSD/Recovery/trauma
Day 4: Mental Health Unit, Providence Hospital, Anchorage by K. Beth
She says she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder. That’s like the worst thing you can have, worse than Bipolar. I feel better being around her because suddenl...
1 minute Read/ACEs/Featured/Girls & Women/Haibun/Literature/Loss/Memory/nonfiction/On Memory/Secrets
Back to Jackfork Quarry by Stacy Pendergrast
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 ...
1 minute Read/Black Memoirs Matter/Escape/Featured/Flash/Girls & Women/Grief/Literature/Loss/Love/nonfiction
Spare by Maame Blue
It wouldn’t be the last time I tried to cure a broken heart with recklessness.
2018 #Guns And People Runners Up/3 Minute Read/Contests and Prizes/Family/Grief/Guns/Loss/nonfiction/Regret/The #Guns and People Award Winners
Death and Grief by Patricia Woodell
I had been looking out of the window, just ten feet away. I had been at that spot since they began shooting and I knew I hadn’t moved, turned my head nor blinke...
15 Minute Read/ACEs/Childhood/Contests and Prizes/Family/Guns/Inspirational/Literature/Loss/Memoir/nonfiction/On Memory/PTSD/Survival/The 2018 Memoir Magazine #Guns Essay Award Winners/The #Guns and People Award Winners
And Nobody Died That Day by Norah Vawter
We are real people. We live in the aftermath of violence. We live with the consequences of too many guns and too few regulations. And the story doesn’t end the ...
For Nugget By Ashley Swanson
I never knew you. The books still talked about you in terms of food: This week your baby is the size of a poppy seed. This week your baby is the size of a plum....
Redacted Relationship By Keith Hoerner
Redacted Relationship By Keith Hoerner
L Y D I A by Anne Hosansky
"She confided that she’d actually been divorced twice. “Now I’ve switched to women,” she added, as if it were another accomplishment. I was suddenly aware of th...
Letter to My Husband Who Died Suddenly by Felice Aull
I want to tell you about your death because I feel some guilt about the final events of that night. I have repressed the guilt in order to keep living but I nee...
One Year After the Fire by Kevin Taylor
I’d talked with firefighters about extension — how a fire spreads — all the while constructing, mentally rehearsing and refining an elaborate plan for my own de...
2018 #MeToo Runner Up/10 Minute Read/ACEs/childhood sexual abuse/Family/Loss/#MeToo/MeToo/Rape Culture/#SAAM/Society
What Insomnia Told Me by Märtha Custis
Fear silences our voices and daily we convince ourselves that life is fixable, that it gets better and becomes whole again. But the fact is that it doesn’t, at ...
#MeToo: Over It by Shannon LeBlanc
My friend, however, already had a concrete notion what the pronoun "it" did. Rather than calling the rape—the one I had experienced months earlier—by its name, ...
15 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Girls & Women/Literature/Loss/Memoir/Memory/#MeToo/On Memory/Rape Culture/Survival
The Fade By Sara J. Sutler-Cohen
But I only knew the mechanics of sex, not its consequences. Who does at thirteen?
2018 #MeToo Runner Up/10 Minute Read/ACEs/Adversity/Girls & Women/Loss/#MeToo/MeToo/Rape Culture/#SAAM/Survival
Seeing Red by Shannon Tsonis
It’s got to be near three in the morning and my head still stirs with all the alcohol I had helped myself to. The alcohol I didn’t buy but paid for. Dearly.