Essays
We Survived the disaster in texas, but climate change makes me wonder if i can live here anymore for vogue
“A few days before the power, and then the water, went out in our Houston town house during what’s been called a thousand-year winter storm, I was having a glass of wine with my neighbor in her garden. ‘Next time you want to evacuate, evacuate here,’ she said, slightly joking.”
as a teacher and writer, it’s not my job to manage the feelings of men for catapult
“It’s not my job to absorb every feeling a man has. In my classroom, I am the one who decides whose feelings get airtime, and how they are shared.”
THE WAY WE TAKE OURSELVES APART FOR GUERNICA
“I tilt my legs back and forth; draw my knees together, cross one leg over the other, my shorts pushed up on my thighs. I’m trying to catch the weak overhead light. I position my phone above my lap, higher. I take the picture.”
The girl I didn’t save [excerpt from THIS IS MY BODY] for Longreads
“She’s saying ‘thank you’ when she blinks like that,” Hannah’s mother says.
Hannah is dying. She lies in her bed, in her bedroom, surrounded by cards and flowers. Her mother sits on the edge of the bed, stroking her hand. Hannah’s husband of one month is beside her, propped against pillows, cross-legged. A few close friends are here as well—they sit against the wall, knees pulled to chests, or lean against the window ledge. Every few seconds Hannah’s ribcage rises in a struggle for breath.
voices on addiction: the promises for the rumpus
“I put down my phone and jog over to the ball, remembering I have a body. I enjoy the way it feels to move. I pretend to be a mother playing kickball—I jog and stop, kick and leap. I wonder what the man would think if he saw me like this. I leap higher. Kick harder.”
Kacey Musgraves is a queer country music fan’s dream for Them
Country music may be better known for its red state politics than LGBTQ+ inclusiveness, but a star like Kacey Musgraves has never been one to follow the crowd. After spending nearly a decade in Nashville building a career that has all but redefined modern country — all while wholeheartedly embracing her queer fans — the 30-year-old Texas native has achieved the rare kind of mainstream recognition that many country performers crave but rarely attain, and become a gay icon, to boot.
Witness Tree for Ecotone Magazine
Infirmary Music for the Literary Review, Named Notable in Best American Essays 2017.
The first person I sang for like this was Sarah. She was twenty-six. Four months after her oncologist cut a sarcoma from her arm and gave her the all-clear; four months during which she planned her wedding and imagined her future, the cancer was metastasizing. It was in her lungs, in her bones. Everywhere.
Lord willing and the creek don't rise for The Rumpus
Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. I heard this phrase for the first time after moving to Houston from Manhattan, a few months after September 11, 2001. I heard it again the night Hurricane Harvey arrived onshore 210 miles to our south, as a Category 4 hurricane. This phrase means we make our plans, but we don’t cling to them. But it is, more than anything these days, a nod to a more pastoral time. Before technology, before all the things we’ve built around ourselves, physical and otherwise—levees, reservoirs, Netflix—to keep out the creek. We say Lord willing, or I do, but we know even if it rises, when it rises, we’ll get through.
Songs as Sanctuary: On Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road for Sick Pilgrim
Once not long ago, at my lowest point of faith, of faithlessness really, after my father died and I was deep in the trenches of “nothing matters,” I listened to a podcast. This podcast in particular talked about putting things that inspired wonder or awe in you, into a “God box” in your mind. Like a sunset, or the sound of birds singing, or whatever. Put it into the “God box.” The guy on the podcast said it helped him recover his lost faith. I thought that was ridiculous.
Fear of flying: Inside the memoir on submission Wind Tunnel for Brevity
“What is it Mama?” my daughter asked, her so voice so hushed I could barely hear her. “What did they say? Mama?”
My daughter is not a quiet person. When she speaks, she’s usually heard. Maybe she was afraid of my answer. Or maybe I couldn’t hear her over the rush of blood in my ears, the slap of my palms on the hot steering wheel, the tepid air conditioner in my ancient Honda, barely keeping out the one-hundred-degree Texas heat.
How to talk with the dying for The Houston Chronicle
I offer you this: to believe our suffering is meaningless is a more frightening proposition than death. And so, in the face of death, or any loss, our pre-wired tendency toward meaning-making lights up the dashboard.
Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron's How to Fall in Love with Anyone for The Rumpus
I tried to read Anna Karenina. I can accomplish this one thing, I thought. I’ll give it a year, and at the end of that year I will be able to stand up and say I’d read Anna Karenina. I got to page eighty-two after three weeks and gave up. I tried to read Madame Bovary. I thought, here’s a book I can learn from, another book about the perils of forbidden love. I’d received the gorgeous translation of Bovary by short story writer Lydia Davis the year before on my birthday, and it had been sitting unmolested in a dusty stack beside my bed. I’ll get lost in this one, I thought. I need to get lost.
Evangelical-ish for The Houston Chronicle
Within weeks of moving to Houston from New York City, I had enfolded “y’all” into my daily vernacular. When I went back to New York to visit, I stopped by my old office to say hi to my friends and show off my newfound Southern-ness. Within seconds I had said it, “y’all,” and everyone squealed.
How Can Evangelical Christians Support Trump? The Damaging Doctrine of 'Complementarianism' for The Houston Chronicle
The parking lot was so packed that the line of SUVs, minivans, pickup trucks, and sedans had spilled out onto the freeway feeder road as carloads of women waited patiently to be directed into a parking space. Once out of their cars they were legion. All walking at a brisk clip, mostly white, mostly well dressed, many wearing chunky Southwestern jewelry and cowboy boots. Every one of them eager to get settled into a good seat with full view of the stage.
If a Jewish Girl Falls into the East River for Killing the Buddha
“He wanted me to have an abortion when I told him I was pregnant with you,” she said. “Did you know that?”
We were at Houston’s, a swanky restaurant on Park Avenue having rotisserie chicken and splitting a plate of those skinny, shoelace French fries. I’d already moved from New York to actual Houston, the city, where my fiancé lived. A few months earlier, I had been baptized a Christian on the beach at Coney Island, in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel. Though my mother wasn’t Jewish, until my whirlwind conversion I’d always self-identified as such. Maybe because of the New York neighborhood I grew up in, but also because my Jewish father once told me we couldn’t join a certain country club where I liked to ice-skate because they were anti-Semitic. Henceforth I was Jewish, culturally speaking.
The One-Hundred-Year-Flood for The Butter
On May 25, 2015, the night before my husband’s forty-second birthday, he was watching the Houston Rockets beat the Golden State Warriors at a local bar. It was raining. My daughter and I were already home, waiting for him to return after the game. She was eight and had school the next day, so after she went to bed, I texted my husband for an update on his whereabouts. The rain had turned into a flash flood, and reports of submerged cars and stranded motorists were beginning to hit social media. He was only a few blocks away; though I’ve learned in weather like that even a short distance can be impassible.
Grieving On Facebook for Role Reboot
When my friend Grant died in 2009 from kidney failure, he didn’t have a Facebook page. He was 26, and otherwise very social, and though Facebook was popular at that time, it was not as unavoidable as it is now. His absence from it was a non-issue. He was regularly tagged in his friends’ photos so when we couldn’t hang out for whatever reason (my daughter’s dentist appointment, his dialysis appointment) I’d see him online. At the local brewpub playing darts, at a friend’s birthday party, at a concert. And it was fine. He was fine. Until he wasn’t.