This past spring I attended a writing workshop with the memoirist Beverly Donofrio. The prompt she used to get our group of pens moving was this: Complete these three statements: I come from…, Once I…, and Now I….. Immediately, the sound of ink rollerballed against moleskins as the twelve or thirteen of us dug deep...

When the package containing David Quammen’s Spillover arrived on my doorstep one morning, I cracked the book from its cardboard shell and set it on my bed for evening reading. But I returned later to a crime scene: the book splayed on the floor, its hard cover dismembered, and the first chapter merely shreds hanging...

I had the privilege of being edited by Richard Todd. It was my MFA manuscript for Goucher College, and to give you a sense of how massive that stack of paper was, it cost Todd $6.35 to mail the manuscript priority mail to my house. It weighed more than a Chihuahua. Stuck to this Leviathan...

So what animal would you be if you could come back again? I cringed every time the teacher asked us this question. I never wanted to be an animal, except maybe a sacred cow in India, free to wander the streets, showered with treats, and totally loved. Short of that, I’ve always felt that animals...

After several years of marriage, I woke one day, looked at the man lying next to me and asked, “What was I thinking?” I’ve done this twice. The first time happened when I couldn’t get husband number one to have sex with me. This was particularly troublesome when he came home one day and admitted...

If you lived in Boulder, Colorado, in the eighties, as I did, you had to have known about Rocky Flats—a factory just south of town that manufactured triggers used to detonate nuclear bombs. And you had to have read news articles in the Daily Camera and the Colorado Daily about problems at the plant with...

Once, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, a four-year-old boy wandered so far into the forest behind his house, his mother called the search-and-rescue. They looked until past dark. Imagining bobcats and rattlesnakes, she cried. I, the boy’s ten-year-old neighbor, peered out the window wondering where the mountains end, if he would take...

Years ago, I dated a mentally ill man. He wrote hours on end without breaks for food or sleep, roared loudly at the slightest joke, and later suffered a complete breakdown that required hospitalization. At first, I brushed off concerns about his mental state. I was going out with an eccentric artist who was so...

As a child, I never knew what to say when people asked me where I was from. I’d reply that as the daughter of a diplomat I was born in Virginia, but I’d moved every few years to places like the Philippines, Morocco, and Egypt. Certainly, a nomadic existence was exciting, but I also felt...

As a woman who has traveled extensively through the wilderness, alone, two kinds of cliche adventure stories make me wince in frustration: accounts that are adventurous merely because the traveler is female and single, and tales of travelers seeking redemption in the woods. Surprisingly, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Alfred A....

When I was in the fourth grade, somewhere between learning about moving decimal points and the history of the California Gold Rush, I became aware of my body’s automatic responses—breathing, blinking, swallowing.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hold my breath for long without the teacher noticing my red face, or turning from...

How do we understand our mothers or any topic that is so close to us, we are not sure where our selves end and the subject begins? As Alison Bechdel reveals in one of the many metanarrative moments of her graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012,) the task...

As a teenager in the 90s, I remember the anticipation of creating a time capsule. I recall sitting cross-legged with my two sisters sifting through a tattered cardboard box of memorabilia—jagged salt-crusted pebbles collected from the Dead Sea, sloppily written notes from friends, and a stuffed monkey in heart boxers from a long-forgotten boyfriend—attempting to...