my own private dave coulier

I caught Covid last December. Around the same time I sank into a profound depression. The depression was easier to source; it was dark in London every day before four, I hadn’t seen a friend in person in months, and the thrill had long gone out of changing your Zoom background to the most salacious…More

pandora’s storage unit

Which, I think, is why I pulled the rope ladder out of the well and put the cover on with you down inside there that time, kind of like sealing you off. That way, there would be no more Mr. Wind-Up Bird around, and I wouldn’t have to be bothered by those thoughts for a…More

i finally got something right

9 years ago I had a degree in English and a job selling ballet shoes for barely above minimum wage. I had left Vassar the year before assuming that a job would make its way to me in the way jobs did in the books I grew up reading, in which smart people made livings…More

if i could only make me better

In the spring of 2010, not long before my college dance company’s annual gala at the local opera house, I borked something deep in my hip. The gala took place each year in the dead of upstate New York winter, which meant that there was always a spate of injuries right before, mostly slip-and-falls down…More

heaven is other people

Sometimes I am boggled by the gallery of souls I’ve known. By the lore. The wild history, unsung. People crowd in and talk to me in dreams. People who died or disappeared or whose connection to my own life makes no logical sense, but exists, as strong as ever, in a past that seeps and…More

2020 in books

I thought this might be the year I beat my 2015 reading record: 89 books, 32,379 pages (thanks, Goodreads). Even a pandemic is no match for commuting from Astoria to the Meatpacking District, I guess. I came close this year with 79 books, 31,284 pages. That mismatch between books and pages relative to 2015 is…More

any other name

At 31, with my faculties and most of my dignity intact, I’m hard-won. People know me and know of me. More

nuance, but nuanced

I lapsed briefly the other day, while reading about Eleanor Roosevelt’s course at an English boarding school, into cursing anew my subpar secondary education. I’m tired of the Internet right now, the barrage of too-pat memes that flatten every systemic failure into a hot take with a solution simple enough to fit into a hashtag,…More

writers: they’re just like us!

I recently read two books written by people I know. (It’s cool. I’m fine! I love the choices I’ve made and that I expend my creative energy tweeting on behalf of a corporation.) The first, a collection of essays, was by a friend with whom I share not one but two alma maters: our performing…More