ONE WILD RIDE

By Shea Marque ~ All I could feel was sadness and hopelessness at the impossibility of connection at the level I craved. So I wrote, in a slightly surreal state which comes across in these three linked vignettes. It was a way of keeping her alive, of making my own connections with her, and grieving…

By Dan Crawley ~ I set out to write a story about the different manners in which my parents traveled along in their metal frames. I didn’t want the story to detail the day-to-day struggles of their failing health (my dad was diagnosed with kidney disease just before his fall). That is why this piece…

By Fiona McKay ~ My relationship with my mother is wonderful – if I am exactly the person she dictates. If I am too loud, or too large, or in a myriad of other ways fail to conform to her expectations, then things aren’t so good. Or weren’t, before the dementia, which is worse now…

by Doug Jacquier ~  Know that when the times comes for a parent to enter aged care, the impact of the choices involved can have a profound impact on both you and them. Be prepared to deal with your guilt.

by Veronica Montes ~ It was the honor of my life to do this work, but my regret is this: aspects of Mom’s care required a clinical disassociation entirely separate from my identity as a daughter. We didn’t talk about it, but she must have felt much the same.

by Kathy Fagan ~ Almost nothing is more essential to my practice than asking questions, and, when engaging with issues of mortality and love, there are almost nothing but.

by Ofelia Brooks ~ Writing about this topic allowed me to face my fears about mortality head-on.

by Lynn Mundell ~ I took a break from creative writing after Dad’s death, but perhaps unsurprisingly when I returned to it he was the only topic for a while. I almost felt like he haunted my attempts at writing.

by Matt Barrett ~ The nights we’d spent at her house, eating chicken tetrazzini and her famous coleslaw, were now a distant memory, and I felt like I needed to say something in a kind of emotional burst that became “Graffiti the Walls.”

by Chris Cottom ~ When my son asked me what themes recur in my writing, I counted more than a dozen dad stories. And I told him I’d worked on ‘Fathers Day’ for several months before realising I wasn’t writing about my relationship with an imagined, fading father. I wasn’t the son in the story…

by Nancy Ludmerer ~ Because I write mostly fiction, not memoir, writing on this topic is similar to the way I write about anything else. A story may arise from a prompt in a workshop; a submission call from a journal for a thematic issue; or simply a glimmer of an idea or image from…

by Brooke Randel ~ My grandma is a Holocaust survivor and the thing about survivors is that they survive. So the thought of her mortality was not easy for me to grasp. As her health began to falter, I took notes on my phone of our visits together. I wanted to remember the little things…

by Maria Haskins ~ When I wrote this story, one of the things that was on my mind was how we view old people, like our parents and grandparents. Often, I think, we see them as though they have always been old, as if they’ve always been parents and grandparents.

by Sudha Balagopal ~ For years, the sound of the telephone ringing after 10:00 p.m made my heart sink. Logically, I understood that the fear was irrational, since bad news can arrive at any time, day or night. As an immigrant living thousands of miles away from aging parents, the telephone was the only thread…

At the time of writing, my largest challenge was to respect the fact that my sister had an adored and adoring relationship with our mother. Mine was detached and complicated. How to respect my reality without damaging my beloved sister and her memories?

As the sole single sister in a family of four daughters, without a live-in partner or children and with a flexible consulting practice, I became the caretaker kid for both parents at different times.

Get to the heart of the hurt and lay it bare.

n writing CNF or essays, the first drafts may not be the story that needs to be told. It may be just a vehicle for getting some of the emotional backdrop down on the page.

Caring for a sick parent or relative takes a whole new dimension when you cannot be physically close to the person, especially if you are an immigrant and the distance between you and your loved one is thousands of miles.

Starting with the orange allowed me to focus on a single, potent thread. So did the passage of a time. Looking back, I could see connections I wouldn’t have had the time, or the bandwidth, or even the impulse to consider in that present.

I wrote “My Kuleana” seven years after I received my MFA. It’s a part of my short story collection (Hard Skin) written when I realized I actually wanted to write again. This was before my flash and micro days when I still believed that I needed to write longer.

When I’m writing about caring I’ve found that I come at the narratives in one of two ways. This means that I usually lean into either “just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” or, “just because it isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

This piece began in two different places. One part was a prompt in a Kathy Fish class to write about a dream, quickly, without thinking about it too much and without trying to make it “mean” something. The telephone dreams in the piece represent a real recurring dream I used to have about needing to…