Genre: Essays

In December 1950, Flannery O’Connor boarded a train in Connecticut to visit her mother, Regina O’Connor, in Georgia for Christmas. She was twenty-five years old, had left Georgia at age twenty, and was riding a string of successes. A graduate …

It was almost twenty years ago now that a stranger took my photograph. This had never happened before, not that I knew, and it has not happened again since that night. The photograph was taken in Manhattan, in the upper …

In late February of 2020 I traveled home to Pittsburgh to salvage what I could of my grandparents’ lives. After caring for them and their things during their final years and after, my aunt was moving to Florida and giving …

In the face of precarity, unsustainability, and isolation, artists, activists, and revolutionaries are turning to care. Militant research collective Precarias a la Deriva asked in 2006, “why not begin to imagine and construct an organization of the social that prioritizes …

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you? 
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”

Spring semester of 1974, I was a student …

Over morning coffee, I read Science Daily, scanning the titles as if they were Tinder profiles. What do I desire today, I ask, because my appetite for the world is an erotic force that can be kindled by a …

Hold 

 . . . the ditto ditto fills the archives of a past that is not yet past. The holds multiply. And so does resistance to them, the survivance of them: the brittle gnawed life we live, / I …

My mother is Susan Power. And I am Susan Power. People call us “Big Susie and Little Susie,” all in one breath as if we are a single creature with two heads and four hands. Mama sews us dresses out …