My husband no longer lives in the present with me. I don’t argue with him anymore as he prods me to remember the vivid details of a story he is telling. I engage with him and smile instead, building up our history even if it’s only in his head. In 2018, at the age of […]
Grief
All That Remains
The two of them stand in the shadows—shoulder to shoulder, side by side. I gaze at their backsides, for their faces are fixed on the black and white images moving on the screen before them. I sense sadness in their shadows. I am very young, for as I reflect on the date it is November […]
Loosening My Grip
The klaxon sound of the motion detector alarm rouses me unceremoniously. My adrenaline is immediately pumping. I narrowly miss stepping on the dog in her little bed as I rush to get to mom’s bedroom. I need to reach her before she takes too many steps on her own. One night I didn’t make it […]
America Looted The Black Body: (RIP George Floyd)
America . . . Since our society’s conception You have looted the Black body. Take, rape, stripped us bare to our core, while you feast, prosper, stay safe, and ignore. All the blood you’ve shed, lives left dead, children unfed so that you live free in this claim of inheritance for liberty and justice for […]
The Good Catastrophe
And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting […]
Lessons Learned from Living in Limbo
The heaviness that settled over my chest that morning was as dense as my husband’s weighted blanket tangled around my feet. I kicked off the covers but the anxiety wouldn’t lift. It was one week into the Coronavirus crisis that had settled over our country like a dense fog. It started on a normal Thursday […]
She is Valor
Tell me your brush with greatness. How often have we danced around this one—in ice-breakers, job interviews, admissions essays? Predictability aside, it’s an intriguing litmus test. This was the first speech I assigned students in my Public Speaking & Discussion course. Because, really, who doesn’t want to stand in front of a college classroom of […]
Meet the Princess of the Press: Ida B. Wells
This was first published in March 2015. Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Before Billie Holiday sang the lyrics above at Cafe Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York, another icon of […]
Anchoring Ourselves to the Truth – A Review of Making Peace With Change
When we settled back in the U.S. last year after our living in South Asia, it felt like the world had moved on without us while we occupied another plane of existence altogether. We might as well have been returning from outer space. My family got used to living in partially packed houses or out […]
Permission to Weep
I knew I was supposed to be mad. My head told me that I should be grieving. But it didn’t feel real. My twitter feed once again testified to mass shootings. As I read more of the details and was able to piece together the details of the two different shootings that happened on Saturday, […]
Excerpt from A Prayer for Orion by Katherine James
Editor’s Note: Kate James has written a vibrant memoir about her son’s battle with heroin, and her own experience during that time. This is an important book and we highly recommend it. Kate generously allowed us to use an excerpt today as her book launches! Few parents can say the word heroin. It took me […]
Is Love Worth the Pain?
For the first year and a half, I called out her name. Over and over again, I would startle myself awake once I had barely fallen asleep. My arm would shoot out from my body in a desperate attempt to stop her, to catch her, to convince her to stay—the shout of her name went […]
Waiting For the Thaw
The word appeared fully formed in my brain as I sought an adequate description for this sense of emotional paralysis. Winter. I rolled it around on my tongue, playing free-association word solitaire. Winter is cold. Winter is dark. Winter might be beautiful, but it’s dangerous. Winter scenes offer hauntingly lonely images of stark black branches […]
My Ricocheting Heart
Today, the simple gray sock I hold in my hand becomes my new best friend. It must be magic; because here I am, just minding my own business, moving through this mundane laundry chore, when I come across this sock and feel it unlock a door deep within me. I am suddenly slingshotted back in […]
Grieving the Flood
The weight of what was happening there and here was hidden somewhere inside my gut and I was exhausted all the time.
Waiting in the Graveyard
In the first half of 2017, I was restless. I’d left my job as a teacher the previous year to write full time and though I’d written countless words, nothing seemed to be going anywhere. My blog was still a regular thing, but the book I thought I had in me wasn’t taking shape. There […]
Breakthrough After Breakdown
This was my resurrection day. The day when all the pain would be redeemed. The day when I would stand and proclaim to the world what God has done. To release my pain to God’s will, for His use. Rewind to the previous night. I was on the bathroom floor, pen and journal in hand, […]
In Like a Lion
On the night before my grandmother died, a tornado struck Mills County. You can always tell when it’s on the way; just slip your hand behind the sash and press your nose against the screen. Can you hear the echo of sparrows? Do you smell the sweet- ness of rain? Then draw in your […]