My writing rides the waves of musicality and poetry. Or it marches forward, unvarnished. Sometimes it does it all. I am currently working on a manuscript called The Place Where You Are Now about my parents’ devotion to a counterculture revolution and my own spiritual path. I have a MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a micro chapbook with Louffa Press, Don't Imagine A Future with Me.
You can experience my writing in these essays:
My parents spent the 1970s on communes: first, a shared house in Boulder; after that, a “self-realization fellowship” in Paonia, Colorado; then the Spring Hollow farm in Tennessee, with a dozen other couples. They were out to save the world, or at least themselves. Peace, love, and understanding.
One of the first questions you confront in any five-borough conversation is, "Where do you live?" “Crown Heights,” I say. Inevitably the next question is: “How do you like it?” You would think this would be straightforward, easy to answer, but it’s not. Not for me.
When you watch a man on the tracks before an oncoming train, that’s exactly what you do: watch.
You can shout at him.
You can yell, “Train!”
You can grip your New Yorker and suck in your breath.
You can exhale when the Brooklyn-bound A stops twenty feet short.
You can widen your eyes when the man stumbles in your direction, toward the platform where you await the Manhattan-bound A.
Never write from a place of despair, especially if it is your thirty-third birthday and you have just spent far too much on a Japanese notebook and a pen that looks like a pencil. Never write from a place of despair in your brand-new Japanese notebook with your pencil-looking pen if you are sinking in the shadow of last night on a train to Harlem with a five-count of Cinco de Mayo churros and you are wondering what it all means.
Four years ago, a woman I love—a friend who felt sisterly and vibrant—died of breast cancer. She was 33. I feel like I must spell it out: thirty-three. I want to paint it on a brick wall in the middle of the night. I want to wear it like the scarlet letter A. I want every billboard to read two numbers: 3 and 3.
