“People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing,” (Machado 228). In her memoir, Carmen Maria Machado finds the words, after years and difficulty, to articulate what it was like being in an abusive same-sex relationship. Part fairy-tale, horror …
“One day I will die, and one day everyone I know will die. One day everyone I don’t know will die. One day every animal and plant on this planet will die. One day earth itself will die, and one day all of humanity, and all relics of human life,” (Austin). Twenty-seven-year-old atheist lesbian Gilda …
“Whether we realize it or not, we often find ways to alleviate feelings of existential aloneness through the seeking of unity…Food, entertainment, success, sex, relationships, busyness, gossip — there are plenty of ways to divert our attention from the unavoidable, terrifying aloneness of human existence,” (Bolz-Web, Nadia, 21). Sex has long been a taboo subject in …
“We are restless people by nature. We roam, from one house to another, one city to the next. There is a limit to how long we can stay somewhere before people start to notice,”(Moore 13). Seventeen-year-old Pieta, or as she’s called Pie, is invisible. Not in the metaphorical sense, but really truly invisible. She is …
After getting a call from her estranged, dying mother to come home Vera Crowder does, because that’s what a good daughter would do. But home means the Crowder House, the house her father built, and though Vera felt much comfort there growing up it has it’s own bodies buried there, literally. Because Vera is the …
“they bisect the frozen river, vacant lots, the barren school field — all roads lead to the Pit.” – Desire Paths (Borin 3). I was lucky enough to get to visit The Westminster Hotel, or as it’s affectionately called The Pit, when I visited Dawson City last fall. When my dad had visited the previous winter he …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “An act of faith. Faith—true faith—does not come without grappling in the shadows; faith never comes free from doubt” (Rauch 100). Sara Rauch is in a long-term relationship with a woman when she begins a low-residency MFA. While there, she finds …
“I sat with that for a long time. I thought of every person I had met, wondering how many of them had wolves inside them and just had never pulled them out. Or perhaps more horrible: how many of them, in a moment of fear, reached inside themselves for something to save them, and came …
“I wanted a kind of logic. A reason. An assurance that things worked the way they were supposed to. Creatures lived and they died and sometimes they returned in a different form. Sometimes they haunted the living, and sometimes they let us be,” (LaCour 145). Mila has graduated from high school and aged out of …
Sarah O'Connor 