An excerpt… When Kate opened the cabinet doors she saw nothing but pineapple, can after can of pineapple. She had been there the week before dropping off her mother’s dry cleaning, but she didn’t think to look in the kitchen cabinets. She held a door open in each hand, counting. “You have sixteen cans of pineapple.” “I do?” Stella put her wooden spoon down and…
Finishing the Writer’s To-Do List
My to-do list goes something like this: #1 Wash the dishes. #2 Clean the litter box. #3 Write my final paper. #4 Publish 100 amazing books, and be the best writer ever. #5 Live happily ever after. Let’s be honest: You’re reading this blog because you’re a writer, too, and you probably have a similar, absurd to-do list. But I love writers because we’re outrageous…
Yucca Blooming
An excerpt… I was a tourist. I was a tourist on a sheep farm in Indiana. I was a tourist in a man’s bed. I was a tourist in the world of rules and business casual and strategizing for the greater good. I was a tourist in my body, now wobbly and foreign; it was difficult to walk and think simultaneously. It was difficult to…
Blasphemy is Easy in Love
Her brothers passed me at the dinner table like salt. Her sisters took me out of each other’s arms with fingers spread to protect my neck. Aunt Margie and Grammie Lorraine prayed three rosaries for me, on the black rosary from Ireland that hung beside the telephone in the hall. The same rosary that was draped on my uncle’s hands when he laid dead in…
Blue-Black Number 4
An excerpt… The summer after I graduated from high school, my father started wearing jewelry. First a platinum watch. Then a small bracelet, a thinly threaded band of yellow gold. Then some chains to match. He wore two, maybe three of these at a time, nestled in the gray, white-crested waves of his chest hair, his shirt unbuttoned lower than usual to show them off….