Evening Muse
Snow, a hemlock and a sinking sun, all watched through the glass of a garage window. Then a crow's cry pulls the speaker back to a pond behind her father's house, where the ducks' laughter brought her brother to his knees.
Read
Writing · Creative
Creative Writing
Poems, short prose, hermit-crab essays. The slower work.
broken boy
At a café table in old Barcelona, a mother learns that her son, an ocean away, has crashed his car and spoken of ending his life. This is a poem about distance, an inherited darkness, and the few words love can offer across both.
ReadWalk in the Fog
Fog over snow, black tree trunks, the light going. Picking her way between white patches on a darkening path, the narrator remembers a childhood game played with a sibling on their mother's checkered kitchen floor.
Readan ordinary girl
Carolyn's life, told in brief scenes from the age of four: a first bike ride, a scratch-paint drawing, an upside-down bedroom shared with her friend Ella. The scenes darken as she grows, and the story ends on the drive home from a party she will never report.
ReadOnly the Dandelions
Natalie Greenberg has worked at the Oakwood Inn in northern Michigan since she was sixteen. She's thirty-two now, with three children and a husband who keeps leaving, and she sizes up every stranger who comes through the door. Then the sheriff brings news that settles the question of Wade for good.
ReadEdgar Allen
At seven, a nearly silent autistic girl is sent to live with her grandparents in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where her grandfather is hand-raising a fledgling raven. Their friendship lasts twenty-two years and gives her language.
ReadHell Hath No Misery… Like A Teenage Girl
An experiment with the hermit-crab essay form. A girl's adolescence, told as the program for a musical nobody would want to see. The cast list, song titles and credits carry an essay about family, appetite and disappearing.
Read"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."Edgar Allan Poe