By Catherine Palmer

You might think your personal essay is complete, but wait until you try this twist! I’m going to show (not tell) you how to deconstruct, reduce, remix, and shape your essay so that it feels like you’re writing a new one from scratch. Sure, that’s a lot of work, but think of it like this: roast chicken is perfectly fine, but revision pot pie is submittable!

Why leave well enough alone when you can do better? Tighter sentences, a more logical flow, and a pithier epiphany can only enhance the flavor of your story. If you’re tired of leftover clichés, revision pot pie is for you! I make a lot of this pot pie, so I should know.

To begin, I hole myself up, not bothering to shower or dress for several heart-wrenching days while I slice and dice what I thought was a perfectly fine essay. It’s so satisfying to take the meat off the bones, shred sentences, toss entire paragraphs, and turn my hard work into something unrecognizable on its way to being fantastic—or at least finished.

My family loves my revision pot pie, but honestly, I find the effort even more gratifying when I can share it with strangers. Here are some of my favorite revision pot pie tips:

1. If you don’t have a solid draft on hand, start with a previously finished piece. My friend Joan likes to take an essay she’s already published and rip it to shreds.
2. To make a crust of confessions especially flaky, open a bottle of wine, sit on the kitchen floor, and remember your childhood. This trick never fails to produce layer upon layer of trauma.
3. Revision pot pie is best when it has had time to rest. Start long before your deadline so you can go back to it again and again. . .and again.

Recipe

PREP TIME:         Your life up until this moment.

COOK TIME:       Usually several days. Could be weeks. Or you might never finish

CUISINE:             Personal essay

SERVES:              Everyone who takes a bite

Ingredients

For the crust:

• 2 1/2 cups self-doubt
• 1 tablespoon therapy
• 1 teaspoon tears
• 1 cup cold hard truth, cut into bite sized pieces (makes them easier to swallow)
• A splash of cold water
• 1/2 cup regret (see recipe for substitute if GF*)
• 1 painful memory, lightly beaten

For the filling:

• 1 perfectly fine essay
• comments from 2 medium workshops
• 3 scenes, minced
• 3 cups (or more) new writing
• 1 heaping cup characterization
• 1/2 cup diced dialogue
• 4 heaping tablespoons of detail
• reflection to taste

(*Guilt Free)

Instructions

1. To make the crust, pour tears, self-doubt, and years of therapy onto a blank page. Splash your face with cold water before folding in regret. You may substitute fear for regret if you are GF. Add cold hard truth and use a sharp red pencil to cut, cut, cut until the truth is all that remains. Form into a ball and chill.
2. For the filling, pick through workshop comments thoughtfully, discarding duplicates and suggestions that make no sense. Toss the essay into your emotional blender and use the Track Changes attachment to blend comments until all scenes are totally minced. Pour off any defensiveness that may have surfaced.
3. Place the minced scenes on the back burner, allowing the comments to simmer with your essay until the meat separates from the bones. Set the bones aside (you’ll need those later) and hack what remains to bits to create a meaty essay stew. Cool off, then skim the fat from the top.  
4. Over three cups of coffee, pull 2,000 additional words out of thin air. Add generous amounts of characterization, dialogue, and detail, and season with plenty of reflection. Don’t skimp on the reflection! Fold new writing into the essay stew and bring it to a simmer, stirring continuously to release the full flavor of each ingredient. This might take some time.
   
   A quick note of caution: Making a revision pot pie is tedious, and you may grow impatient with the process. If it feels like it is becoming too difficult, resist the temptation to throw in the towel, wash a load of towels, shop on-line for new towels, or attempt towel origami. A short break to stretch or rehydrate can be helpful, but too much procrastination is the enemy of a successful (i.e., finished) revision pot pie. Stick to it! I promise it will be worth the effort.
   
   
5. When the filling is ready, it’s time to give your essay stew some structure. Adjust the bones you saved in Step 3 on a lightly floured surface and place the ball of truth you made in Step 1 at the center. Use a rolling pen to connect the two, shaping into a smooth narrative arc. Gently place the result into a 12-point, Times New Roman template.
6. Trim any overhanging words, then pour the essay stew gently into the template, discarding any fatty bits. Some writers grow attached to these extra bits, but cut them out. You can save them—they might be just right for a quick and easy weeknight poem!  
7. Brush with a wash of painful memories and then let your revision pot pie bake for a few days.
8. Repeat steps 4 to 8 as necessary.

I hope this recipe helps you rediscover the joy of slow editing like it has for me. I used to be a fast-edit junkie. It was easier to drive through the work of revising. But a diet of fast essays left me feeling bloated…yet still hungry an hour later. Now that I’m losing that stubborn first-draft weight, I feel more satisfied without the bulk.

Just imagine enjoying juicy details, crisp dialogue, and tender scene-setting all wrapped in a crust of flaky confessions, in the comfort of your own home. In fact, with this recipe for revision, you may never leave the house again!

About the Writer:
Catherine Palmer has been a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, and a single mom. She was a college drop-out, then in her 30s an adult night-school student who earned a BA in English and an MA in Marketing Communications, both with high honors. She spent three decades in corporate marketing before reinventing herself as a writer and a graduate student at Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. She blogs about her midlife reinvention, becoming re-inspired, and life in Vermont at asmuchheart.com.

By Allison Landa

You wanted it to be a miscarriage and so it was.

It was just some blood. You’d seen worse. It was a little bit of cramping. Nothing you couldn’t handle. An interruption in an otherwise stultifying and ordinary day. Under most circumstances that might be welcome.

You walked out of the bathroom and made the pronouncement. Your husband looked up from the work-issued laptop he carried home weeks ago. Your senses were on red alert, expecting something, unsure what. The air tasted of dust; the few passersby were glacial in their movements, hesitant and jerky as a puppet worked by a nervous handler.

You wanted it to be a miscarriage because you wanted to believe your body worked the way others did, that it didn’t have The Condition. Sometimes pregnancies were viable. Other times they meant the body flushed away tissue and promise. Life rolled on, just like the ball your son threw tumbled around the street.

“It could be anything,” my husband said. “Don’t immediately go to the negative.”

What he didn’t realize was for you it wasn’t necessarily a negative. If that was what happened—if you were pregnant—you hadn’t even realized it. There were none of the signs you’d seen in the past: the loss of appetite, the all-day nausea requiring lots and lots of ginger chews from Trader Joe’s. You used to love grocery shopping, the hunt and peck, the comparison of list to haul, what you wanted versus what you could get. Now COVID had wrought lines, determined and forced normalcy. When someone greeted you, it was as if the social contract had broken and shattered atop your head. You mumbled something and moved on.

Did you want to bring a child into this uncertain world? By the time your last and only pregnancy wrapped up, you were at the doctor’s five out of seven days per week. It wouldn’t be different this time. There would be testing, ultrasounds, perinatal appointments. There would be concerns and hesitations. And the outside world.

You sat down on your chair. Your husband called it the Good Chair and compared to the rest of the secondhand furniture in your apartment, it was—an easy chair whose massage function had mercifully died just as it grew less relaxing and more seizure-inducing. For once, you missed that feature. You’d have given it a try again. It might have helped with your cranky lower back, which had been achy since you woke up. Even if it didn’t budge the pain, it might have made you forget about it, which would be almost just as good.

“I looked it up,” you said. Your voice sounded brassier than normal, defensive. There were signs, right? The bleeding, the pain. You wanted to suffer, you needed the distraction. Maybe if you felt as though something unjust had happened to you, something unprecedented and unwanted, you could come to terms with what was happening in the world outside.

“It’s the Internet,” he said. “You can’t trust anything there. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying you’re right. I’m saying you need to find someone who knows what they’re talking about, not some wing nut on Reddit.”

You called the advice nurse at Kaiser Health. She was brisk but friendly, tired but professional. “At 45,” she said, “it’s highly unlikely it was a miscarriage. It could be a slipped IUD. It could be breakthrough bleeding, which is a sign of menopause.”

Menopause? Now? You would still surreptitiously play with Barbies given the chance. When did you get old enough for menopause?

“In maybe eight or ten years,” the nurse said, and you relaxed a little. What you wanted to tell her was you needed proof that you were normal. After all these years, all these diagnoses, all the times the doctors talked about elevated testosterone or infertility, after taking prescription after prescription, even after conceiving seemingly out of the blue, you still needed reassurance you were normal, subject to fate and foment, capable of conception, even if you couldn’t always carry it to completion.

The power lay in the negative, your reason for everything. The moments when you welcomed the marital spat, the twisted ankle, the child who didn’t quite make it to the potty—they all offered proof that life was real, not perfect, the way you wanted it. Outside showed just how much life had changed, didn’t it? The boarded-up storefronts where you once ate, drank, played. The few remaining businesses plying their wares, practically begging: WE’RE STILL OPEN! Don’t forget about us. Don’t let us sink into the swamp.

The doctor called.

You hung up and buried your face in a pillow. It wasn’t even one of your good pillows. It was limp and flat, paltry. Your husband stood over you, mentally wringing his hands. You didn’t blame him. You should be happy. You should be relieved. You should feel this weight lifted, that you didn’t lose more than the world was already collectively losing.

“I wanted,” you said, then paused. How to say what you felt? How to express the inexpressible, the outright foolish? How to make yourself understood when even you yourself didn’t get it?

“Don’t,” he said and pulled you to him. In that moment you realized that understanding transcended specifics. It went straight to the heart of the universal, the human. He didn’t have to know the ins and outs of what you were thinking. It was enough for him to grasp that you felt some element of loss.

Somewhere in the universe there is a child. He or she may have even been yours, in your mind, in your imagination. Somehow their life was prevented, cut short. In some way they gave you the loss you needed. In some sense their absence was the presence you craved.

About the Writer:
Allison Landa is a Berkeley, California-based writer of fiction and memoir whose work has been featured in Business Insider, Parents Magazine, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Mary’s College of California and runs the On the Cusp reading series in San Francisco. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and she teaches at The Writing Salon in Berkeley.

By Erin Binney

Swatches of sand, nuggets of gravel, and shreds of skin cling to my right forearm, held in place by fresh blood. This is what happens when you’re nearing the end of your run on the bike path, can barely lift your feet, and get felled by a tree root that has cracked and lifted a section of the asphalt: You wind up sprawled out on the shoulder with a not-yet-dried mixed-media collage on your arm.

A woman riding the other way on her bike slows to a stop and asks if I am okay.

“I’m alright,” I grumble as I sit up, embarrassed and in pain. “Thank you.”

When I get home, my husband asks how my run was. I respond by showing him my arm. Although he cringes in sympathy, his first and most pressing concern is “Did anyone see?”

The next time I run, a few days later, I abandon the bike path in favor of my other training ground—the high school track. There, I run into Stella, a woman whose last name I do not know but who I see walking in lane seven from time to time.

“It’s been a while,” she says. “How have you been?”

I tell her I’ve been using the bike path lately, recount my fall, and show her my wound. It’s starting to scab over now, and there’s a bruise the color of an overripe banana connecting it to the tip of my elbow.

“That looks like it hurts,” she says.

“It does,” I answer.

A few days later, I tell my dad about my fall. “Are you sure you should still be running at your age?” he asks from the other end of the phone. (I am 44.)

The next time I see Stella at the track, about a week after my tumble, she reaches into her coat pocket and produces a leaf from the aloe plant in her kitchen, which she has carefully protected in plastic wrap.

“I was hoping I would see you today. This will be good for your skin,” she explains as she rubs the juice on my arm. As a 21st-century woman, I know I should be more enlightened. I know I should be cheering for the female CEOs and astronauts. But some days, I’m grateful for all the female caregivers.

About the Writer:
Erin Binney is a former business reporter, a current copyeditor, and an Olympic hopeful in home organization. She has a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from James Madison University and expects to earn her MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University in 2021. Her piece “Love Takes a Recess” recently won first place in its category in the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors “Excellence in Writing” Competition.

By Loree Griffin Burns

haiku on spring snow
the neighborhood mice were out
before me, scribbling

spring loneliness—
clutching one warm chicken egg
in each cold hand

direct from the clouds
or waylaid by a pin oak
two types of spring rain

the fancy brick house
is empty now; the tulips
don’t seem to notice

riotous yellow—
missing the girl who called it
“for Cynthia”

About the Writer:
Loree writes about science and nature for readers of all ages. Back in 2011, during a rainy vacation in Rhode Island, she and her family stopped into a used book sale at the local public library. That’s where she picked up a used copy of haiku master Clark Strand’s Seeds of a Birch Tree on a whim, for fifty cents. She’s been counting syllables on her fingers ever since. You can read more about Loree’s children’s books, essays, and haiku at loreeburns.com.

By Suzanne Strempek Shea

Thirty years ago, I ate my final meal as a carnivore. Long after everyone else cut into their T-bones barbecued on my cousin Richie’s gas grill, I stared at mine, the last one for 365 days.

That was my original plan: one meatless year. Over the previous 364 days, I’d frequently found myself in the company of fit and fun vegetarians. As someone raised on meat in every meal and often for snacks, I was intrigued. Then I came across a newspaper article on the realities of veal. As an animal lover, that was enough to convince me to hop onto the vegetarian platform.

“I’m going to have the eggplant parmesan,” I started announcing at dinners out. “Because do you know how they get veal?” Even if no one expressed interest, I’d begin reciting the harsh realities of a veal calf’s brief life.

One night, a friend countered, “Well, what do you think they do to the rest of the animals on the menu?”

Point made, taken, known.

During my youngest years, my family kept a coop to supply poultry for the restaurant we owned. I was well aware that “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” wasn’t just a cliché. Through my college years I fished, and I also worked on a deep-sea charter, where the pre-death flopping of the catch was just one more sound in an enjoyable day.

As a New Englander, I attended enough lobster dinners (more accurately called lobster boils) to know that the normally blackish-green lobster shells weren’t orange from sunburn. Back then, I didn’t know what happened to cows or pigs or sheep in the slaughterhouse; my research left me almost regretting learning about electrocution and gassing.

I might have started my meatless year with hopes of looking like my perky veg pals, but I have continued it to this day in consideration of animals other than the dogs and horses that I have known and loved. I simply don’t want another being to die so I can eat.

I’ve spent nearly three decades learning (and explaining and defending now and then). Who knew broccoli soup is basically chicken broth with broccoli thrown in? Or that cheese isn’t a vegetarian option because the rennet used to produce it comes from the stomachs of calves, goats, or sheep? I found out humans are called omnivores because we’re able to exist on a diet of meat or plants, or both, a fact I recite each time I get a cold and my mom advises, “You need a steak.”

I’ve tried new recipes, starting with a fabulous nut loaf in Diet for a Small Planet, my first veg bible. I stopped announcing why I was ordering pasta instead of pork. Now, I pick the moments when I tell someone that I consume nothing that has a face or a mother.

Some argue that the asparagus on my plate was another victim of the knife. They ask, “If we’re not to eat them, why did God create all these creatures running through the woods?” If nobody ate meat, I’m asked, what would happen to all the cattle on earth? If I think I’m saving a halibut by not ordering one, don’t I realize that it’s lying dead in the restaurant kitchen anyhow, that it will simply go to the next customer? I’m just one person, they remind me, what difference can one person’s food choices make?

Aren’t they only animals, anyhow?

We can only really save ourselves, I guess. As for anybody—or anything—else, we can only try.

For the 30th anniversary of the way I’ve chosen to eat, I’m considering going vegan for 365. No animal products at all—no dairy, eggs, honey. No wool sweaters or down vests. No face creams, lip balms, or cleaning products an animal might have even glanced at. I stopped buying and wearing leather and down 20 years ago, so my closets are already there. Milk-containing milk chocolate might be a slower conversion for me. It’s all a process.

If I turn around to look back on my life, I’d like to see 30 years of lives that might have been spared due to my not ordering the kind of food I gorged on during my first 31 years: Flintstonian-sized turkey legs, pillowy scallops, Polish ham sliced thin.

In anthropomorphisms that recently had an acquaintance rolling her eyes over my years of “not eating the best kind of food,” I like to imagine that turkeys are gobbling their thanks, scallops are clapping in the mud, and pigs are grunting a Happy 30th Anniversary to this one little person and her one little decision.

About the Writer:
Suzanne Strempek Shea is the facilitator of the summer Creative Writing Field Seminar in Ireland, the director of the undergraduate creative writing program, and the Writer-in-Residence at Bay Path University. The latest of her eleven books are the biography This Is Paradise and the novel Make a Wish But Not For Money. Her memoirs include Songs from a Lead-lined Room, Shelf Life, and Sundays in America. Suzanne won the 2000 New England Book Award for contributions her books have made to the literature of the region. She’s been featured on NBC’s “Today,” on National Public Radio, and in USA Today, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in publications including The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, Yankee, and The Bark.

By Casey Lane

What one-night stands have to teach us

The walk of shame is a sobering act. It’s a moment of pure clarity in which we, for those few steps, that short drive, that time in the shower, are awakened, by euphoria or contrast, to the dispassionate truth of who we are.

Expectation

If you’ve ever lain in bed, the sheets draped over your legs and waist, the moonlight illuminating the curve of your spine while he rubs your back gently, the thick coarseness of his hands reminding you of your femininity, every hill and valley of your body a landscape of his desire, while the gentle smile of peaceful satisfaction rests on your lips, then what I have to say may not interest you.

Reality

But if you’ve ever laid in bed, lifting the sheets up and over your hips—locking them beneath your armpit as if tenting your body for sin—his hand flopped open, unknowingly on the back of your head, scratching your scalp like he’s rewarding a dog who’s just learned to sit, your eyes using the moonlight to scan the room for casualties—a shirt on the undusted nightstand beside you, pants in tango with whatever towel he’s calling a quilt—as his phone rings, its display showing the name of his best girlfriend, the cheerfulness of his “Hello” cutting the stilted silence of your immoral affliction as you slide out of bed and restore your underwear to duty, dress in the bathroom, then with a quick smile of forced satisfaction, wave goodbye while he looks at you confused (the phone still at his ear) and he half-heartedly mouths, “Where are you going?” while you keep moving, grab your purse, take a final sickening look around the room, tiptoe down the stairs, out the front door, and jog towards your car in Guest Parking, I’m here for you.

Awakening

I have too many stories like that, stories about nights where I’ve come to my senses only after having them pounded back into me. Nights when I’ve had to leave my assumptions about love and return home to the sanctity of regret. Nights that have ended with me standing in the shower, the steam filling my lungs while the heat of the water softens the shame on my skin—pieces of loneliness and self-abandonment swirling down the drain at my feet.

Nights when two felt like one, until I felt like enough.

Nights when I’d return to bed—my own this time—cleaned, lotioned, and pajamaed, the cottons of my clothes and flowered bedspread mixing, hugging my body as they held me tighter, filling the gaps beneath my knees and hips while my head rested on a pillow, the moonlight peeking through another set of blinds—my own this time—dropping breadcrumbs of light on a clear carpeted floor, mapping a route from my bed to the stars.

Acceptance

There’s nowhere to hide when we run from ourselves, no persona we can don that doesn’t rinse in the rain.

The moments between his house and my own were a whirlwind of consciousness. Moments when embarrassment and pride swirled like a tornado gathering force from both sides before finally settling somewhere in between, a vacant and undeveloped space where acceptance wasn’t an admission of guilt but the first step towards love, where the urge to retreat brought me from doubt to disillusion.

That ill-timed exit became my first act of self-care. In that moment, the scratch on my head wasn’t from his hand, but a soulful itching for sudden escape, a gentle nudge from within, ushering me from darkness to awareness, from my back to my feet, from his bed to my own.

And so I walked — shamefully, regretfully, and truthfully—home.

About the Writer:
Casey Lane is a writer, blogger, and International Program Manager for a Los Angeles-based marketing agency. She has self-published a children’s book, Lucky Love & His Moms, and she is currently writing her memoirs. Casey is also working toward her MFA in creative nonfiction writing at Bay Path University.

By Andy Castillo

I enter a world of burnt rubber and bumping tires. Rolling luggage and passersby whiz around me, tumbling toward their destinations in a frenzied hurry. Announcements in Russian come rapid-fire over the loudspeakers, reverberating through the crowded St. Petersburg train terminal in a chorus of noise that’s accented by the occasional train whistle.

On the platform, mist swirls around idling trains, mingling with the savory aroma of frying cheburek (meat turnovers), shawarma (wraps filled with roasted meat), and pirozhki (buns stuffed with various fillings), all infused with the stench of cigarette smoke.

Ahead of me, a young woman steps hurriedly from a train car. She’s met by a well-dressed man carrying a bouquet of roses. He sweeps her into an intimate embrace. They forget about the roses and fall into each other, overcome by emotion, oblivious to the chaos surrounding them.

They don’t care about bystanders who smile at their affection. They don’t care about Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or hacking scandals or the Cold War or the horrific death toll Russia suffered in World War II—topics that are ever at the forefront of my mind as a Westerner traveling to Moscow for the first time. The only thing they care about is each other.

It’s a tender moment in a city forged by violence.

Although more than 75 years have passed, the sting of the Nazi army’s failed Siege of Leningrad (as the city was known during World War II) is evident in St. Petersburg’s historic streets and throughout Russia. Traces of the grueling offensive that began in September 1941 are embedded like the remnant shrapnel preserved in the façade of a building, like the Soviet hammer and sickle emblems emblazoned on structures ranging from light posts to bridges.

For 872 days, Nazi forces blockaded a city the Germans thought would buckle before winter. But despite extreme hardship and apparently insurmountable odds, the city’s defenders never surrendered. The toll was great; 800,000 civilians died, most from starvation.

In 21st-century St. Petersburg, my sleeper train awaits beside the platform just ahead of me. I climb its steps a few minutes before 9:00 p.m. Inside, narrow hallways crisscross the train. I find my room; there’s a middle-aged man inside.

Aleksei is his name. He is 40 years old and heavy set, with a light floral scarf wrapped loosely around a tweed suit. His shoes have been discarded beneath one of the two small beds in our compartment. He looks at me and smiles a broad, toothy smile, then takes a sip from a glass of hot tea resting on a pull-out table. In broken English, he explains that he is traveling for work, to Moscow, where he owns a customs business that deals mostly with European clients. It’s a trip he makes regularly.

“If you’re traveling by train, you must have black tea with lemon. Only on the train,” Aleksei says. Then he removes a bottle of Johnny Walker from his jacket pocket, takes a swig, and orders dinner for us: Caviar and toast, sauerkraut, sausage, pickles, ketchup, and spicy mustard, topped off with two shots of vodka.

“Forty percent only. Not 38,” he says, taking another swig of his whiskey.

Drinking is an intrinsic part of Russian culture. While growing up about 10 kilometers outside St. Petersburg, Aleksei says he made homemade vodka and sauerkraut with his family. They soaked cabbage in water, vodka, and a little bit of salt for about six hours before mashing and transferring it to a three-liter bottle to ferment for six months. The finished sauerkraut’s flavor was intense and harsh—like the country where it was made.

Aleksei, however, represents Russia’s softer side, one that’s unfamiliar to me.

“If you come to Russia, you will find friendly people,” he says.

The compartment door opens and a waitress enters with a tray of food. I try to pay Aleksei for my share, but he refuses my money, waving a limp hand in my direction.

Then he picks up the two shots on the tray and gives one to me.

“Hello vodka,” he says, and throws it back. I follow suit.

In Russia, strict social rules surround the serious business of drinking vodka. According to Aleksei, the first shot of the night (which must always be consumed in one gulp) is proceeded by the toast, “hello vodka”; the second, “to us”; the third, “for family”; the fourth, “for friendship.”

The food disappears almost as fast as the first shot of vodka. Aleksei orders another round.

“To us!” he shouts, and we drink again. Glassy-eyed, he orders more. If he were standing up, he would be staggering. For my part, I’m feeling OK, and for a minute I’m proud of myself for outpacing him. Then I realize he’s probably been drinking all day.

“Why is vodka so popular in Russia?” I ask.

“It’s normal. Vodka is,” Aleksei trails off and smiles, then admits, almost sheepishly, as if he’s telling me a great secret, “I like wine better.”

For vacations, he and his wife often tour the wine countries of Spain and Italy. Personally, Aleksei says, he thinks vodka is overrated, but it’s tradition—especially on the train—in Russia.

The third round is delivered. “For family,” he says, and we drink again.

My head swims. I can’t tell if it’s the alcohol or the rushing train. I lie back on my bed and check the time. It’s nearly 1:00 a.m. I need to sleep and say as much before stumbling down the narrow hallway to the tiny bathroom to brush my teeth.

When I return, a fourth round is on the table. “For friendship,” Aleksei says, looping my arm through his own and tipping back his glass.

The vodka burns down my throat.

About the Writer:
Andy Castillo is an experienced newspaper journalist who has worked for a few publications in western Massachusetts and as staff travel writer for GoNOMAD Travel. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s degree in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University. He lives in Florence with his wife, Brianna.

By Judy Bolton-Fasman

The first time I had to socially distance, I was six years old with a severe case of strep throat. “Look at those pustules,” the doctor muttered as he gagged me with a tongue depressor. To this day, I cannot stand eating ice cream on a stick.

I lived in my parents’ bedroom that long spring, watching black and white television. I wanted company and wrote to my aunt 40 miles away to send me a Barbie doll. My parents fought when my father wrapped me in a bedspread and sat me on the driveway in a beach chair “to take sun.” My mother cried. She was sure that germs lurked everywhere. She was certain I would contract scarlet fever.

“Fresh air is good for her,” my father bellowed.

My father wanted to cure me. My mother wanted to convalesce me. I acquired my fearsome, what-if imagination from my mother. Disaster and danger were as ubiquitous as grass and sky. Throughout my childhood, I rarely left the house without holding her hand. When I was sick, she told me not to leave her double bed. And for the most part, I didn’t.

Now, my 85-year-old mother lives in a nursing home. I don’t tell her that there has been an outbreak of the coronavirus in her facility. I don’t tell her that she’s tested positive for COVID-19. Thus far, she’s asymptomatic. On the telephone she tells me that her 100-year-old roommate, Sadie, coughed throughout the night, and then went away.

“Where is she now?” I ask.

“En el cementerio,” my mother says matter-of-factly in her native Spanish. To think, only a thin curtain separated my mother from Sadie’s mortality.

Illustrations of the virus look like demented tinker toys. Red pieces of wood that resemble golf tees are stabbed into gray pockmarked balls. These invisible and viral tinker toys are on doorknobs, on the mail, on the credit card I hand to the cashier at the grocery store. They’re on the steering wheel of the car.

I don’t take my cell phone with me when I walk the dog in case an errant germ lands on my screen. On one of those walks I see my neighbor weeding in front of his house. He forgets for a moment and steps towards me. I stagger backward. “Yes. Sorry—of course,” he stammers.

I am a few months shy of 60—that boundary between the biblical sounding decree of “who shall live and who shall die.” My husband, who is 60, grocery shops during early morning hours designated for senior citizens. “Do they think old people don’t sleep?” he grouses.

People talk about the “silver linings” of this pandemic. I imagine most of those silver linings have teeth like a buzz saw—a macabre toothy grin. Get too close, and that’s how a limb gets severed. But I love waking up to my sweet husband. In normal times he works out of town during the week. Now, I love hearing his voice booming through the house as he conducts business on video-conferences. He’s a scientist responsible for organizing coronavirus testing sites.

At the home, my mother’s television is always on, broadcasting in the midst of her room’s fluorescent dusk. She checks for pandemic news all day. At night she falls into a restless sleep listening to pandemic bulletins. But nothing on the news is as harrowing for her as the forced quarantine she endures in her six-foot by nine-foot room.

 “Estoy encarcelada.” I’m imprisoned, my mother says.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve wanted to hold my mother’s hand. But right now, I long to do just that.

I’m anxious about being housebound. I’m terrified of becoming the agoraphobic I was in my early 20s. That’s when I moved to New York City to teach myself to be in the world. My cover was that I went there for love and then for graduate school. But the truth is I found comfort in counting my way around the city. I memorized avenues and was mindful of the numbered streets. I ended up living in the city for nine years.  

The news hammers away at me. New York City is the epicenter of the virus. So many people die—young, old, even children—no one is spared. Refrigerated trucks are converted into makeshift morgues. Fifth, Madison, Park—avenues that are tumbleweed empty now.  Yellow police tape does the job of vacating playgrounds and parks.  New York, where I taught myself to be free, is a deathtrap now. 

In Spanish, corona means “crown.”

In astronomy, there is the sun’s luminous corona.

When I visited my son in Spain this past winter, we drove through A Coruña, the largest town in Galicia.

When I was a little girl, my mother told me a story about the time King Solomon, took off his crown and placed it on his mother’s head. There is even a Ladino song with the refrain, Que el coronó, a el su madre, en día de alegria, de su corazón. “When the king crowned his mother, it was a day of joy, a day close to his heart.”

“That is how you honor a mother,” said my own mother.

Corazón, corona.

When my mother calls today, I hear her panting on the other end of the line. I become terrified that she is finally presenting with corona symptoms.

“When is this going away?”

It takes me a moment to understand she’s okay, that she is talking about the virus in general.

“When are you coming to see me? Te extraño.”

On the surface extrañar means “to miss.” Really, though, it’s a deep longing for something one will never have again. It’s a word my mother used whenevershe talked about Cuba. “Hay Cuba como te extraño.”

“I don’t exactly know when we’ll see each other again,” I say to her softly, lovingly. “But we will get through this,” I whisper, entirely unsure of what I have promised.

About the Writer:
Judy Bolton-Fasman is a four-time winner of the American Jewish Press Association’s Simon Rockower Award for her essays. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times (op-ed page), the Times’ family and parenting section (formerly “Motherlode”), the Boston Globe, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Superstition Review, Lunch Ticket, Split Lip Review, Modern Loss, WBUR’s “Cognoscenti” essay page, The Forward, O Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has been awarded fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, the Mineral School in Washington State (2018 Erin Donovan Fellow), and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (Alonzo G. Davis Fellow for Latinx Writers 2020).

By Suellen Meyers

Zelda Diaz-Blitzstein sent me a text.

I’m so sorry to have to tell you your Dad passed away last night. 

Manny was my biological father, but he wasn’t my dad. Zelda knew him much better than I did. She’d been married to him almost since he and my mother split up 52 years ago. Depending on whose story you believed, Manny either had an affair with Zelda while still married to my mother, which caused the divorce, or Manny first had an affair with a blonde and then met Zelda on an airplane shortly thereafter. I can’t tell you which is accurate because I was a child when all of that happened.

What I can tell you is that one day I was living my five-year-old life like everything was fine, and the next day I was at the Los Angeles airport with my sisters and our mother waiting to board a plane bound for Mom’s hometown of Minneapolis. There we were in our California clothes with coats and snow boots stuffed in carry-on bags ready to be donned at the other end of our adventure. 

At almost 11, my sister Chelle understood what was happening. Margi, at two-and-a-half, hadn’t the foggiest notion of anything beyond her own need to eat, sleep, poop, and play. I was right in the middle—old enough to feel secure in the life I had, with no idea that my parents were breaking up, let alone how that was about to render me fatherless.

I caught on quickly that the subject of Manny upset my mother, something I strived to avoid at all costs. I didn’t ask about him; she didn’t volunteer information. As a result, my mind is like a partially erased chalkboard before that day we left for Minnesota. I know there was the ranch house on Madora Avenue, and that there were neighbors next door who had a swimming pool. There was my swing set and my dog, a cocker spaniel named Cookie. There was never-ending California sunshine and there were trips to the beach, Disneyland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. There was Oakdale Elementary and my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez.

I have the photos to substantiate. But when I try to envision my life with Manny in it, there’s a big blank space where my father used to be. I do not remember saying goodbye. 

Eleven years passed before I would speak to or see Manny again. I was the one who initiated the meeting, but I didn’t recognize him at first. Perhaps out of loyalty for my parents (Mom remarried shortly after the divorce and I considered my stepdad my dad), I told Manny a short time after that meeting that I didn’t want to continue seeing him. Again, we lost touch. 

Twenty-eight years later, my husband found Manny and sent him a letter, and we reconnected once more. I was afraid. I had questions, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answers. My mother had Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t ask her.

I always thought Manny had abandoned Chelle, Margi, and me—until he told me Mom had changed our phone number all those years ago and he couldn’t find us. 

And that’s the thing about about what we think we know. People say things, but that doesn’t mean the things they say are truthful. Just like the manipulation of scientific data, reality can be skewed. 

Today, I am a writer of nonfiction. My previous work revolved around situations where I knew the story first-hand. As I write my current project, a memoir based on my abandonment issues and Manny, I’ve had to rely on historical information found online as well as the accounts of aged relatives I have not spoken to in years. What I have uncovered is melded together like a patchwork quilt. What fits here might not align there, yet some pieces fall into place perfectly, like Goldilocks’ slumber when she lays on the mattress that’s just right. 

Opening myself up to more than one version of truth allows me to tell the story objectively. In my mother and Manny’s case, I can see them as layered beings who did not always make the best choices. Wherever the truth lies, I do not believe either of them intentionally did anything to hurt my sisters or me.   

I lost Manny twice, the first time at five and again, to his death, years later. When I received Zelda’s text, I was devastated. My reaction took me by surprise. I called her immediately. She told me Manny spoke about his three girls until the very end.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sure was nice to hear.

About the Writer:
Suellen Meyers is agoraphobic and she’s not afraid to talk about it. She writes nonfiction on themes of family, loss, addiction, anxiety, agoraphobia, and resilience. Through her writing, she strives to inspire those who live with anxiety and panic disorders to see that they can lead productive and happy lives. Her work has been published in The Manifest-Station and r.kv.r.y Quarterly Journal. Suellen is currently obtaining an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bay Path University. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, with her husband, Gary, and Zoey the Elf Dog. Her website is https://www.fearlessagoraphobic.com.

By Heidi Fettig Parton

Nick Flynn is telling this group of writing conference attendees how the French use the term recit in place of memoir, but I can’t focus on what he’s saying. I can’t because, if you don’t know, Flynn is rather swoon worthy. Though I wonder if he’s holding onto a last glimpse of hotness, brilliant sunset that it is. I wondered the same thing last year when I saw Sting up close at a sound check wearing some impossibly skinny jeans. Flynn is scruffier, grungier, than Sting. Flynn is Kurt Cobain with his shit together.

When I squint at Flynn, I see the kind of guy I crushed on in college—all those liberal artsy dudes I never dated because I was attached to the business major I ultimately married. Perhaps Flynn was one of those geniuses in my creative writing courses—the pony-tailed, flannel-shirt-wearing guys who read their essays aloud without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, without the slightest fear their words were anything less than brilliant. God, how I envied them.

Flynn is now turning towards the projected screen behind him, referencing one of his slides. I wonder if he knows that his boyishly messy hair is thinning in back. This isn’t something a person can easily see—and, really, Flynn’s disappearing hair does nothing to undermine his good looks. Hotness doesn’t fade in men the way it does in women. At age 65, Clint Eastwood played the ruggedly sexy photographer opposite Meryl Streep in the film, The Bridges of Madison County. Streep was 46 at the time.

There are, of course, exceptionally well-aged women. Coaxed along by good genes, personal assistants, and airbrushing, Jennifer Aniston continues to smolder on magazine covers at age 51. In recent years, I’ve taken to thumbing through copies of People at store checkouts. I’m watching for the moment when Aniston goes from being “world’s most beautiful woman” to a “woman who still looks good for her age.” I’ve grown obsessed with spying that invisible line. At the same time, I’m cheering Aniston on. I want her declared “world’s sexiest woman” at 65.

If Flynn were to squint at me on the elevator tonight, might he follow me back to my hotel room? Might he see the same woman who, in her thirties, was told she looked 20? “You’re too young to be a mother,” they’d tell me—those men I dated, one after another, in the years following my divorce.

“I’m making up for my twenties,” I’d say. I married, had two children, and graduated from law school, all before age 25.

I am listening intently to Flynn now. He’s reading from his new book of poetry, I Will Destroy You. I stick with his words for a few minutes before checking my phone. Back home, my guy is likely putting our child (my third, the one born when I was a so-called geriatric mother) to bed. He’s the same guy who watched me gyrating to Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” the night I was the only one in the bar who interpreted the song as a dance number.

By then, I’d learned to dance alone, to dance like (and even when) no one was watching. But the tall red head who would become my second husband saw me. Yes, Nick, I’m married and, as I’ve deduced from your poems, so are you. I guess we won’t be squinting after one another as we walk the hall back to my hotel room, and I won’t be running my fingers through your thinning hair. It’s actually okay. I already had plans to solo binge-watch Flea Bag (the season featuring the hot priest); I didn’t really want you to see the cellulite on my thighs; and, thank God, I need never write a recit about our fling.

About the Writer:
Heidi Fettig Parton received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University. Her essays and poetry can be found in many publications, including Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Entropy, Forge Literary Magazine, Harbor Review, St. Paul Almanac, The Manifest-Station, and The Rumpus. Heidi lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, where she’s at work on a generational memoir about divorce. She also serves as a steward of the St. Croix River and its watershed. Her website is www.heidifettigparton.com.