Photo Essay You love your boyfriend. There are days you want to do nothing but rub his belly as if he were a dog. There are days you do this. Others, he tells you about each boy he sees wearing gray sweatpants & talks…
Recently, a man I’ve been seeing told me that he hasn’t mentioned me to his therapist. “Things are going well,” he told me. “There’s nothing to say when the feelings are good. It’s the problems that need talking about.” And I know exactly what…
Broken for Art’s Sake: On Exploding the Linear Memoir (Author’s note: As will become embarrassingly apparent, this is the text of a talk given at the 2012 NonfictionNow conference in Melbourne, Australia, in a session titled “Rethinking Memoir: Contemporary Approaches.”) Three or four years…
Interviewed by Todd Summar Aleksandar Hemon slips fluidly between genres and forms, each project an unexpected new entity, yet still part of a continued conversation with the world around him. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon was visiting Chicago in 1992 during the outbreak of the…
I don’t cook. Not because I can’t, but because I believe there are so many people who are so much better at cooking than I am, that I’d rather pay them to create a meal for me, than muck around in the kitchen on…
Writing, for me, is a lot like music. Writing has the same ingredients as a song—rhythm, pacing, flow, and lyrics. Reading something should feel like music to your ears. There are countless of songs that bounce off our heads daily. It rings in our…
During Christmastime when I was 14 years old, the boy I was dating was over at my house helping my family bake cookies. We had baked snickerdoodles and gingerbread, and we were moving on to my favorite peanut butter cookies. My boyfriend, Gary, was…