When I can’t sleep, I often listen to Public Radio, sometimes the BBC through the Minnesota Public Radio stream, but sometimes the Public Radio International (PRI) internet stream. Late one recent night the show To the Best of Our Knowledge from PRI came on with an episode titled “Why the Internet is Toxic for Women.” […] Read More
Negging “Low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances. This is something no decent guy would do. They say that the assholes get the girls, but I can spot negging a mile away and I reject these fuckers straight off.” - Urban Dictionary, MadamexXx […] Read More
"I am the problem that solves me." - Jennifer Willoughby from Beautiful Zero This book of poems by Minneapolis poet Jennifer Willoughby was so fun. Language crackles and sings, and there's enough meaning that this cock-eyed view of the world gives us all the space to be. If only no one believed themselves a problem. […] Read More
“Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.” ― Dorothy Parker Should I dare argue with the late, great Dorothy Parker? My quibble: it’s not only New Yorkers who know the power of twilight. Southerners and Midwesterners do too. Sitting in the clubroom at A-mill […] Read More
In about 2010, I received the motherlode of watercolors my grandma’s aunt Alma painted. My grandma’s last remaining sister was in the nursing home and therefore her second home, which had once been my great-grandmother’s was finally being sold. But first it had to be emptied. My dad knew Alma’s painting style, and he was […] Read More
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” ― James Baldwin I’ll admit I haven’t read as much James Baldwin as I might have, but the more I learn about him […] Read More
“My weapon is literature.” ― Chinua Achebe I fell into Achebe’s Things Fall Apart hard. It was a dramatic story that questioned the evangelical Christianity I had been raised around and in. It’s the colonized speaking back to the colonizer in the colonizer’s own idiom. Sure, it’s also a book about a center that doesn’t […] Read More
I remember staring into a computer screen in a dorm room. It is the Fall semester of my second year at college and I am failing spectacularly except for Chinese I, which I will somehow get a B in. I want to say I’m the definition of someone who has given up, but that is […] Read More
“[Christine] Stark has done something in Nickels that deserves our attention. She has not only remembered, but she has resisted the impulse to editorialize. Instead, she has given us the pure voice of the survivor, and in doing that, she compels her readers to experience the world—fragmented, distorted, with fragile islands of comfort and familiarity—through […] Read More