Permission by Diane Gillespie
She was frequently absent from my class, sat in the back with another African American student, and never participated. I wrote notes on her papers to come to ...
3 Minute Read/Anorexia/Featured/Family/Health/Identity/Literature/Mental Health/Mental Illness/nonfiction/trauma
Harrowing by Natalie Coufal
In the black-and-white photo I hold, Dad delivers his salutatorian speech to a small crowd. Dated May 1959, the picture is unremarkable except for Dad’s skeleta...
True Crime by Hilarie Pozesky
Melissa was killed six years ago. A couple of years after, I learned a TV show was to feature her story. I felt compelled to watch it. The show opened with the ...
7 Minute Read/ACEs/Aliens/Childhood/Featured/Family/Funny/Girls & Women/Immigrants/Mental Illness/Mothers/Mothers and Daughters/nonfiction
How I Discovered America by Sharmila Voorakkara
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. ...
Finding Satan on the Road to Damascus by Spencer Soule
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...
7 Minute Read/ACEs/Childhood/Doctors/Escape/Funny/Inspirational/Medicine/nonfiction/Parenting/Science/Society/trauma
Doctors and Torture: A Child’s View by Diane de Anda
As I watched this soft-spoken, self-effacing elderly man repeatedly humiliated by his wife, all the venomous rancor I had held for years completely dissipated. ...
5 Minute Read/ACEs/childhood sexual abuse/Family/#MeToo/nonfiction/Pedophile Priests/Rape Culture/Religion/#SAAM/Secrets/trauma
Playland by Jacqueline Regan
On the way home, he took me here, to this place under the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the shore of the Hudson, on the front lawn of an apartment complex where neither...
5 Minute Read/ACEs/Childhood/Featured/Faith/Family/Fathers/Grief/Inspirational/Loss/Man in The Mirror/Memory/Mental Health/nonfiction/Parenting/Relationships/trauma
Haunting Words by Emma Rose
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 ...
10 Minute Read/Featured/Family/Grief/Guns/Inspirational/Justice/Man in The Mirror/nonfiction/Society
Name is a Four-Letter Word by Chris Parent
*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 ...
15 Minute Read/Adversity/Escape/Featured/Incarceration/Inspirational/Loss/nonfiction/Refugees/Survival/trauma
From Mauthausen to Freedom: A Story of Resolve and Assimilation, chronicled by Louis Arthur Norton
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...
1 in 300 by Cephas Barbosa
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 ...
5 Minute Read/Aging/Alzheimer's/Being Body/Featured/Family/Girls & Women/Grief/Identity/Inspirational/Loss/Mothers/Mothers and Daughters/nonfiction
Telephone Booth by Molly Bashaw
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. ...