Follow my sister, Nina, and me as we make a book together: my writing and her gorgeous inks on paper.

Posts from the “Memoir” Category

14. Frisky

Posted on June 22, 2020

I’m on my way back up to Queens and Malcolm will join me in a few days. This is the first leg of our trip on our way to be with Andrew in London and Paris over Mardi Gras. I hit TSA pre-check, where the guards admonish people about what not to take off or out or your bag. So many rules to remember to forget. The last time I flew, I confessed to having a Loop monitor, along with the other people admitting to pacemakers, metal hips and prosthetic legs. I got patted down by a woman in rubbery gloves, around my bra, the suspicious underwire, between my legs; the hibernating long-ago violations, reawakened by touch. I wanted to tell her to fuck…

Categories: Memoir, Uncategorized

13. Let Me In.

Posted on June 22, 2020

The second sister lives across the lake in a grand old cottage raised high on pilings. Malcolm counts steps and there are sixteen to get to her front door. Her deck overlooks wetlands filled with creatures large and small.  We meet monthly at the mall to buy a new shirt or a lipstick – always another red for me, always something frosty for her. “You got the good lips,” she tells me. She’s the smallest of us with a body that packs too much suffering: ruptured disks, ovarian cysts that exploded like dynamite, and then a diagnosis last year of an auto-immune disease, Hashimoto’s, which sounds like a kamikaze pilot and almost took her down. Her thyroid stopped working. It’s taken a year to…

Categories: Memoir, Uncategorized

12. It’s Their Town

Posted on May 23, 2020

We don’t have groundhogs, beavers or badgers, but we do have feral hogs. They tear up our levee system, rooting around. Piglets pour out of them in 114 days. They eat meat. They eat their young. Word is that the mob uses them to make bodies disappear. Why can’t they be close to extinction, their lifeline snapped? Instead of cockaded woodpeckers; gopher tortoises; the shore birds, running out of coastline; or Louisiana black bears who give birth in their sleep, awakened from hibernating after 220 days by hungry babies. When the batture floods, driving coyotes into the city, into our neighborhoods. Ring cameras catch them at night wandering like grainy zombies. Our dog, Ella, sleeps on her red cushion, but I hear her stir,…

Categories: Memoir, Non Fiction

Quick Links to Essays & Fiction.

Posted on June 5, 2017

Alive and well on the web: Frederick Barthelme and The 39 Steps – Oxford American Jesuit Dog – ELJ – Elm Leaves Journal The Owls of Solomon Place – Oxford American The Thunder and the Hurricane – Oxford American Ode to Swimming Naked – Oxford American The Hillendale House: Moving Out Mother – Virginia Quarterly Review Crime Watcher – The Morning News A Man – Spork Press Stop – The Literary Review After The Flood -Guernica Famous Fathers – Narrative Magazine Tell Me In Italian – Narrative Magazine When I Lived There – Mississippi Review (2006) His Hand, Restless On My Leg – Mississippi Review (2005) Ski-Doo – Mississippi Review (2004) The Water Laws – Mississippi Review (From 2001) This Life – Mississippi Review (from 1999)

Categories: City Park, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Katrina, Memoir, Non Fiction, Short Story

Airplane Reading: House Beautiful.

Posted on March 31, 2016

(My piece in Airplane Reading, a book of essays edited by Chris Schaberg and Mark Yakich published by Zero Books. Originating out of  the website, the book includes essays by Roxane Gay, Lucy Corin, Pam Houston, and Ander Monson, among many others.) On Sale Now. House Beautiful: When my grandfather died in 1985 my first husband didn’t go with me to the funeral. He was out of work again. “I need to keep the job hunt alive,” he said. The call came in the middle of the night from my father. I lived in New Orleans and my parents were 100 miles away in Mississippi, but we booked the same flight and rendezvoused at my airport. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d flown with…

Categories: Memoir