I’d like to ask you, the reader, to try and recall your first—or most notable—guilty pleasure; I’d like you to remember a piece of media that you kept telling yourself you should despise, but found yourself unironically enjoying it nonetheless. Think about how you…
Firstborn My mother never announced having spent the day with her older daughter, but I always knew. Suddenly, my spaghetti spill was catastrophic; my loss of a gym sock, reckless; my impersonation of the school principal, unkind. Mom had a way of dropping a…
Ode to Not Scot’s There stands a bar underneath the endless shaking of the Montrose brown-line with a top-to-bottom front window and dimmable green light bulbs, with roars of drunken laughter and wood-waxed bar tops. Here is where tethered bodies meet to take laps…
I Set a Fire I don’t know why I set the fire. I haven’t wanted to think about it since. Though I know what I joked for years afterward— “We had to find that baseball didn’t we?” Like I’d been one more dopey kid.…
It Becomes a Question A conversation with Jericho Brown “Your interview is not happening, the interviewer is sick,” the volunteer at author check-in told Jericho Brown. His smile fell, he paused. It was the inaugural Wordplay event hosted by the Loft Literary Center…
Ames Hawkins is a transgenre writer and the author of These are Love(d) Letters, a genre-bending visual memoir and a work of literary nonfiction that explores the questions: What inspires a person to write a love letter? What inspires a person to save a love…
“Dutch poet Harry Hoogstraten . . . managed to shake [Richard] Brautigan from his creative death and together they produced seven improvised drawings, which Hoogstraten kept in his archives.” When asked, “What author do you emulate in your own writing?” Well, that’s rather…