I. Amsterdam has many open-air public urinals, but I can recall only one. It consisted of a semicircle of vertical 2x4s enclosing a...

Brian is handsome under moonlight: black shirt, grey jacket and peppered hair. My husband and Brian’s wife have stepped away from the...

Meet (insert name here) the latest sensation in the world of transgressive fiction. With his shocking, provocative, and downright...

I dreamed I was washing my hands and the skin started coming off my fingers until my finger-bones were exposed. I cried for my mother,...

When the dead comedian does his bit, I always laugh too hard. Secretly I’m welling up, thinking of his wife and kids; thinking of myself....

Some self-labeled “patriots” and other conservatives rage against truthful and complete history and access to books that explore and...

The Gods of the Riff are inscrutable. They hear neither prayer nor plea. They brook no rebuke. They bestow their favor where they will,...

1. I wore the same green, sleeveless jumpsuit two days in a row. We had landed in another temporary home, this time in a small rural town...

A perfect storm happened in 1990 for the sensory-me. I was beginning to understand what being horny meant. There’s no need for me to be...

In 2011, you couldn’t find many places in Seoul, South Korea selling Mexican food, authentic or Americanized. Choi’s Tacos, a small,...

Despite the burns on his face and forearms, his ruptured eardrums, Tsutomu Yamaguchi navigated shattered buildings, melted flesh,...

The summer before my senior year of high school, I was in a youth production of Measure for Measure (one of the Shakespeare plays that...

Dorothy, my paternal grandmother, was a worrier. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70 when folk who had anxious tendencies were simply called...

The gym I went to was old-school. No internet/wireless. No air-conditioning. It had racks and plates and bars and dumbbells that went to...

A month ago, I was in Los Angeles and my husband was in New York on his way home from Madrid and Paris. He’s a writer, fancied himself a...

An MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner has a little secret that only those who’ve been scanned know about. The time spent waiting...

In my fancy Park Service clothes. Stupid hat and everything. First day “opening” the Visitor Center. With COVID, this means unfolding...

When it’s all said and done, and the wild flowers have bloomed, mother forgets. At the moment, she oozes with passion from the thrill of...

Yesterday was one of those snow-stormy I’m-not-going-out Saturdays so I built a fire and started writing a letter, longhand, but it came...

The gas station is holding a squirrel cooking contest (prize: a plaque and a taxidermied squirrel trophy). It’s wearing a little flannel...