Columns
I am not a country-blue-gingham kind of gal, but that’s the kitchen wallpaper I inherited when I bought my home. I started removing it 25 days after arrival. My system consisted of tugging at loose ends while waiting out a phone robot or a pot roast. Five years later, this approach has given my kitchen all the charm of a meth lab, without the fire risk.
~ A Smoldering Sense of Urgency
Student drivers need perfect calm, even when they are cutting off a semi-truck because they didn’t check their blind spot. If you aren’t calm, they won’t learn. I tend to yell when facing death, a weakness my oldest revealed to me several times during her training days.
~ Raising Three Teens Means Four Years in the Passenger Seat
This summer, my mother-in-law gave me a chicken. Not just any chicken, an organic, free-range, locally-sourced chicken. She raised it and some Amish lady slaughtered it. I couldn’t stew it, section it, or soup it. I had to roast it. It deserved to be roasted, which is why I buried it in the freezer.
~ Chicken and Chalk Outlines
This link will take you to an excerpt of A Teacher Named Faith.
OSWALD: See, when two people are so taken up by love that they don’t care what they’ve seen or heard or experienced, it renews all of our faith and hope in love. I guess it’s only natural to want to celebrate it, try to protect it. Especially if it didn’t work out for us.
~ On Bended Knee, Act II, Scene 6
BETTY: I feel like I’m crazy. Are you seriously holding your grandmother hostage for a blanket that’s been sitting at the bottom of a Detroit landfill for the last 30 years?
CATE: Yep.
~ Security Blanket, ten-minute play
Literary Magazines and Anthologies
Losing teeth is a rite of passage. When you’re a kid, it means you’re becoming an adult. When you’re an adult, it means you’re becoming a corpse.
~ Molars and Mortality, essay
The house was out of their financial league but their loan officer, a soon-to-be-ex-friend of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, had worked some magic. He had arranged it so they didn’t need a down payment and the seller picked up the closing costs. Five years later, he had refinanced their house so her husband could buy a fishing boat. Last summer he had pleaded guilty to fraud, her husband had run off with a cocktail waitress, and their house had appraised for $20,000.00 less than what they owed on it. Some magic.
~Those Who Trespass, short story