Category: Issue Valentine 2019

First, a confession: In 2011, I penned a pseudonymous article under the name Sally Racket (an anagram of Crystal Lake) for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s advice column. I’ve never publicly owned my authorship of “Survivor’s Guilt,” which describes how, well, guilty I felt when I learned that I’d finally landed a tenure-track job in English […]

I spend a lot of time alone these days. This summer I moved from the city where I lived for the last ten years to a small town in the middle of Ohio. The move was practical—I was no longer commuting an hour to work—and in moving away from the city where I became an […]

I used to think my emotional baseline was crazy, and even crazier that one week (if I’m lucky) out of the month when I’m in thrall to the indifferent mercy of the premenstrual cycle. During that week, in a condition of “existential disorientation,” to borrow Stephen Ahern’s words, I would gain, albeit temporarily, extraordinary powers […]

What was it exactly? The moxie of Anne, her habit of wearing her heart on her sleeve, her unabashed love for her best friend and her crush? Her canny insights, her rhapsodizing about nature, her orphan-ness, her anger, her smarts, her shame, her triumphs? That baking soda company essay she wrote (presaging the artist-selling-out trope), the […]

Put more poetically, disabilities are the etchings left on flesh as it encounters the world. — Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” And I am a good Subject of Speculation; for all in me is Nature…—  William Hay, Deformity: An Essay This essay is about an obsession, one that is now almost a decade old. I remember […]

‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all – Tennyson, “In Memoriam” Tennyson. I’ve never wanted to believe him here. Out of context, his statement feels like the kind of cold-comfort-yoga-self-help advice you’d share with a friend, in a dark moment, when what that friend really wants is a hug […]

You — you strange, you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband. In February 2012, inside my tall dorm room, the ceiling so high we called it “the cavern,” I watched […]

The vertiginous symptoms of skepticism can be hard to distinguish from the pangs of love. At first it was just a teenage infatuation. I was 16. He was … older. I wrote his name on my lined recycled A4 notepad, where it nestled among doodles of spiraling tendrils and ballerinas. He made me uneasy in […]