The earth was cracked and troubled in Washington, D.C. If only you’d been listening, you would have decoded the garbled whisperings of Auntie Kay’s rapid decline, a sampaguita wilting, just like your bleeding hearts in summer, hot as morning mouth. Instead, you...
Excerpt from the memoir manuscript Good Fortune Next Time: Life, Death, Irony, and the Non-Profit Management of Very Small Colleges December 13, 1993 When Rod Gander, the president of Marlboro College and my boss, climbed down from the hissing, dripping 6:00...
1 I had done my second girlfriend wrong. I was still doing her wrong as I sat in the bedroom waiting and wondering whether she would hear my page over the blare of airport announcements, the shouts of friends spotting friends and family greeting family. But why did it...
My affair with Ivy Hall, the physical affair, started on a shaky note. I had set out to meet her for the first time, after hundreds of emailed correspondence. It was half-past eleven in the morning, and I was sitting inside a moving train, looking outside the window,...
Mary Quade, finalist in SFWP’s 2013 Literary Awards Program for Nonfiction, is also a poet. We discussed writing essays and poetry. SL: Your collection of four essays, Ideal Uncertainties, was a finalist for the 2013 Literary Awards Program for Non-Fiction. What...
