by Sue Mell
This piece details a particular recurring struggle in caregiving, and the challenge lay in my finding a way to communicate that daily experience of intense conflicting emotions, and to capture the weight of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, in a single passing moment. For me, writing has always been a way through, and caring for someone with dementia is such a difficult endeavor, so it’s especially rewarding—and a much-needed release—to be able to express what it’s really like, and possibly provide that same release for a reader.
Sue Mell is a writer from Queens, NY. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook. Her debut novel, PROVENANCE, won Madville Publishing’s 2021 Blue Moon Novel Award and was released in July 2022. Her collection of micro essays, GIVING CARE, won the 2022 Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize, and her collection of short stories, A NEW DAY, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. Other work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. Find her at www.suemellwrites.com and on Twitter @suemell2017
ONE WILD RIDE 