Genre: Essays

If you didn’t grow up this way—not just churchy, not just Christian or Catholic, not just in “the house of God,” but in the kind of church where a note […]

Before we slowed, then stopped, before we inched past the covered body on the ground, we had been the ones speeding by all the bikers. The switchback road offered no […]

1. On the second anniversary of my mother’s death, my aunt took the train down from New York to Baltimore to leave a stone on the grave. When she got […]

A woman draws her story into history.                                          —Hélène Cixous   […]

Feet are comprised of fifty-two bones, one for every week of the year, a quarter of the total number of bones in an entire human body. There are around 8,000 […]

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 […]

There was something about the catchers. The way they crashed around in their armor, throwing their bodies against the world like they were unbreakable, flashing a secret code between their […]

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 […]

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 […]