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

Posts from the “Non Fiction” Category

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

Driveway.

Posted on January 12, 2016

Last month I took Malcolm and Andrew to the apartment in Italy where my Driveway story happened, back in the 1960s when I was eight or nine. I wasn’t sure I had the correct side of the street, but Andrew walked around the corner with me into the street below. I heard voices that sounded like the voices from that night when the neighborhood came to see the fallen car that could have killed someone but didn’t. We were in the right place.

Categories: Memoir, Non Fiction

Taking Issue With Katrina.

Posted on November 4, 2015

In 2009, Guernica asked me to guest edit an issue on the fourth anniversary of Katrina. I decided to include writers and artists who’d lived in New Orleans before and after Katrina. I wanted work from people on the ground who experienced her first-hand, and who then came back to go to school, to teach, to help in the rebuild. I wanted work from people who were ready to talk about what happened head-on, or not. Some of us may not have been writing about Katrina, but we were writing after her, and the loss and anger and frustration were fuel. They still are. It’s 2015 and these pieces will always shake me up. Guernica/A Magazine of Art & Politics.

Categories: Katrina, Non Fiction