ESSAYS

FEMININE NIHILISTIC GOSPEL SONG - River Styx

“For most of my life I’d agreed with writer Jeanette Winterson’s line that marriage was “a plate glass window just begging for a brick.” Weddings seemed like overpriced spectacles for squabbling relatives, and marriage—at its worst—a delusion that devolves into a sticky legal nightmare. But, in the absence of story, marriage became a solid and meaningful foundation on which to build a future, and an anchor I clung to in a sea of uncertainty.”

HEARTLAND - Monologging

"P’s response to my analytical gymnastics was, ‘Your transformation is your education.’ His words sounded a bit like a Zen koan, a solution-less riddle that’s meant to provoke doubt and show the inadequacy of logical reasoning.”

THREE TATTOOS - Monologging

“In the absence of physicality, I wanted to get a tattoo, something to mark how much I cared about him, something of the body. The poet Louise Gluck writes, ‘I wanted it to leave a mark: / that’s how I knew I loved you. / Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, / to have something in the end.’ I wanted to be stamped, wanted to have something tangible. I didn’t end up getting one but it was passion’s impulse and the most accessible solution I could think of.”

RESTORATION — Entropy Magazine

“I hadn’t cried when I’d fallen from the air, or when in a heap on the ground, frozen in place, ladder edge dug into my left thigh. Even the pain when the shock wore off, earthquake-deep, hard to pinpoint, and seemingly made worse by a tingling ice-and-heat salve, only elicited moans and rocking. Finally, I lost it and wept in his office, unable to hold onto the Everything’s Fine I’d mastered, unable to remember what made me unbreakable. Broke, I didn’t have the luxury of focusing solely on physical pain or time for healing.”

LIGHT, PERPETUATED — The Big Smoke

“Depending on how you measure a glowworm’s life, it’s either nine months or three days long . . . On the first night of my ten-day trip to Wellington, I met Adrian, a local Māori man. I met him just eight days before I glimpsed glowworms myself for the first time. Depending on how you measure the luminous affair that ensued, it was either ten days or a few hours long.”

THE END OF CONTINUITY — Medium

“I have a tattoo on my right outer calf that reads Fierce Grace. It’s a large piece, black and gray, with beautiful hand-drawn script surrounded by organic filigree and leaves. “Fierce Grace” is the title of a 2001 documentary about the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. The phrase refers to the moments when grace — a blessing that transforms us, or divinity — is delivered through ferocious events, delivered with a steel hammer, not through turns of good fortune or small miracles.”

TATTOO INK COLUMNS

For The Big Smoke USA

TATTOO INK: BUT IT’S JUST ONE WORD

“About fifty percent of the time, customers would want to negotiate the price of a tattoo. They’d be willing to spend more than a hundred dollars on common purchases like boots, handbags, and jackets—but not on something etched into their dermis that they’d wear forever. People perceived our hundred-dollar minimum as a rip-off or simply exorbitant: But it’s just one word. It’s just a bird silhouette. I thought this was an obviously skewed value perception, but I was also the one behind the counter and I’d try to patiently educate them.”

TATTOO INK: DAREDEVIL (THE FIRST TIME)

“It’s also why we want tattoos—to seize being in a fleeting human incarnation, or to show the world who we are and what we value, or to rebel and give society the middle finger. Sometimes, like it was for me this first time, it’s all these things at once.”

TATTOO INK: (SUPPOSED TO BE) THE ALTERNATIVE TO ELITISM

“Teaching yourself to tattoo is heavily frowned upon and the derogatory term ‘scratchers’ is used for those who have gone rogue and give tattoos without proper training. There can be valid reasons for discouraging this—poor quality work, scarring, and unsafe or dangerous practices. But if it’s notoriously difficult to get an apprenticeship, where does one start?”

TATTOO INK: REVEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

“Art that hangs in a museum or gallery is elite, is success, is making it. I had spent hours in a NYC art school, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and sanding sculptures for the famous artist Jeff Koons—and yet, having art on someone’s skin still seemed the highest honor and responsibility.”

TATTOO INK: ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

“One thing that history often teaches us is that innovators and outsiders are usually chastised in the present and deified later. There’s a difference between respecting traditions and clinging to outmoded ways, between being informed by the past and glorifying the past, between teaching what was and gatekeeping to ensure things never change.”

articles: THE MIDST

A RECLAMATION: HOW TO PICK THE RIGHT TATTOO IN YOUR 40S AND BEYOND

“Although tattoos were long relegated to rebellious youth, it’s not uncommon now for women to start getting them in midlife. Of course, tattoos are significantly more mainstream than when we were born. But also, in many ways, it makes perfect sense that we’d feel readier as we age and many of us enter into an era of reclaiming and reinventing ourselves as we become grown-ass ladies.”

IS IT A MIDLIFE CRISIS OR A MIDLIFE RECOVERY?

“Writer Maggie Smith has spoken on multiple podcasts recently about a midlife recovery — or midlife return-to-self — while promoting her best-selling memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I love the reframe of crisis to recovery, and the idea of getting closer to your true self with age.”

INTERVIEW: EMILY MCDOWELL on menopause awareness, releasing the drama, and leaning into the messy middle

IN PRINT

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ’EM — 2020* The Year of the Asterisk (American Essays - University of Hell Press)

“The crisis quickly flattened any ideas about adhering to plans or controlling life. I felt somewhat glad for the peripheral excuse; I felt like my withdrawal could seem less like a personal failing.”

AUTHOR interviews

DYLAN KRIEGER — Abandon Journal, Issue 4

BRIAN S. ELLIS — Abandon Journal, Issue 4

RAMONA AUSUBEL — WS Team Interview — Willow Springs Magazine, Issue 86

D. NURKSE — WS Team Interview — Willow Springs Magazine, Issue 85