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Haircut
by Kathy Fagan ~ The last time I touched my father I cut his coarse gray hair and trimmed his fingernails, grown ragged in lockdown. We were not permitted indoor visits, but I could take him out of the facility for a medical appointment provided I was screened for covid and we wore masks. That…
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Reflection on Writing
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.
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Mother Tongue
by Ofelia Brooks ~ For weeks after my grandmother’s death, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t miss her, because I didn’t really know her. I didn’t know anything about her interests or passions, or much about her life before she was my grandmother. But I knew what she sounded like. And that’s what I missed.
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Reflection on Writing
by Ofelia Brooks ~ Writing about this topic allowed me to face my fears about mortality head-on.
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Upon Receiving The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Angler Update
by Lynn Mundell ~ Memory is like fishing. Out of the murk it swims, we pull it up, keeping even what’s too small to sustain us. In May the new motor fell into the Pacific and we floated, you and I, waiting to be towed. I carry an image of our catch hooked to the…
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Reflection on Writing
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.
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Graffiti the Walls
by Matt Barrett ~ I want to graffiti the walls where my grandmother lives, white and sterile walls (egg-shell colored walls, as the nurses say), replace her sanitation lists with photographs, magazine spreads, and paper clippings…
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Reflection on 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.”
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Father’s Day
by Chris Cottom ~ I was ten minutes early but Dad was waiting on the bench in his tiny front garden. ‘I’ve been enjoying the sunshine,’ he said, as if I’d never twigged that his true joy was punctuality. After brushing a non-existent speck from his cavalry twills, he pushed down on his walking-stick to…
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Reflection on Writing
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…
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Three Microfictions
by Nancy Ludmerer ~ I drive to the shelter in Clifton where I’ve heard via Petfinder about a cat needing a home. Morris (same name as Dad) is a gleaming stately beauty (orange, white-pawed), a solitary alpha male. King of the hill, they call him. His nose is raw from rubbing against the bars. My…
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Reflection on Writing
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…
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Swimming with My Grandma
by Brooke Randel ~ On my birthday, my grandma loses her speech. Her caregiver thinks it might be a stroke. She is rushed to the ER and I visit her there hours later when her speech has returned and she uses it to introduce me to the nurse. She’s Romanian, she tells me, delighted. This…
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Reflection on Writing
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…
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Silver and Shadow, Spruce and Pine
by Maria Haskins ~ When Grandmother disappears from the nursing home, Marika is the only one who understands what’s happened. The family and staff, they wonder how and why a 96-year-old woman could walk out of her room unnoticed and disappear in the middle of the night. They whisper about dementia and Alzheimer’s. They make…
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Reflection on Writing
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.
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Pebbles
by Sudha Balagopal ~ When Seeta’s phone rings in the United States with the message of Amma’s decline, she leaves for India carrying an assortment of useless things in her suitcase and a cluster of pebbles in her throat.
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Reflection on Writing
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…
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The Fragility of Bowls
by Gwen L. Martin ~ What does it take to achieve the kind of fragility that allows light to ebb and flow in balance? The question haunts me. Joseph destroyed scores of burls for every one he transformed. Was each failure a tiny betrayal of hope or a declaration of love?
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Gwen L. Martin’s Reflection on Writing
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?
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Nearly New Rockports
by Anita Brienza ~ As my father got older and unable to bend and tie his shoes himself, I’d kneel to do it for him, talking rapidly with each shoelace loop so that he didn’t feel awkward having his adult daughter tending to him like a child.
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Anita Brienza’s Reflection on Writing
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.
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A Good Death
by Darci Schummer ~ “I’m protesting Dad’s death,” my mom says. The day before he dies, she emerges from their bedroom wearing one of his shirts. We are all wearing them now: me, my sisters, my brother. I started it but don’t know why. I just know it feels good inside the hollow lengths of…
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Darci Schummer’s Reflection on Writing
Get to the heart of the hurt and lay it bare.
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Skim Coats
by Amy Barnes ~ Hello the grandparents say in cartoon smoke balloons. My not-so-grand parents stand reduced to a suitcase and rummage sale remnant coats. There is money for two things: coffee and cigarettes.
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Amy Barnes’ Reflection on Writing
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.
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A Stream of Prayer
by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar ~ Last week, I video-called Khala, teased her for lounging in the hospital, enjoying being pampered by nurses. If there’s one thing that years of staticky telephone calls and shaky Internet connections has taught me, it is to wrap emotions with levity.
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Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar’s Reflection on Writing
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.
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Orange Communion
by Marcy Dilworth ~ I pushed the hypodermic needle through the skin while jamming down the plunger. Wrong. Half the saline spurted back at me. Nurse Ellen coached me through the steps, which are meant to be sequential – puncture skin, push needle until barrel rests on skin, depress plunger, pull needle out.
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Marcy Dilworth’s Reflection on Writing
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.
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My Kuleana
by Melissa Llanes Brownlee ~ “Grandpa wea you stay?” I open the door to his room but he isn’t there. Mom is going to give me dirty lickins if I don’t find him quick. “Grandpa! Mom said you gotta come take a shower right now.” I close the door and walk down the stairs to…
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Melissa Llanes Brownlee’s Reflection on Writing
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.
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Grief is a Story I Was Told on Rosary Beads
by Electra Rhodes ~ Mam was laid out cotton-starched on the bed. The stillest I’d ever seen her. She’d not like to be known this way so I made a bit of busy noise at the door. As if I’d only just arrived. She struggled and gained no real purchase against the slip of the…
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Electra Rhodes’ Reflection on Writing
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.”
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The Miracle Jar
by Thad DeVassie ~ Arriving at a time my father isn’t home, I decide to clean out the refrigerator – not in the same way I did as a teenager with a voracious appetite, but as the adult child concerned for his aging parent, alone. I go about my business, tossing out salad dressings, things…
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Thad DeVassie’s Reflection on Writing
In documenting my mother’s dementia, the last thing I expected to be writing about was my father’s bizarre forgetfulness as well. It had that stranger-than-fiction quality to it requiring no embellishment, no overthinking. The elements of sad truth were enough, giving me a heads up that dementia and Alzheimer’s are indeed sneaky. Fool me once,…
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Loss Loop
by Tara Campbell ~ One of my plants, a philodendron, drops leaves every spring. Just when she should be happy, sprawling into the light of longer days, a string of leaves begins to yellow. One after another, the leaves lose their green and shrivel, like they’re finally deciding that what they’ve been trying to do…
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Tara Campbell’s Reflection on Writing
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…
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ONE WILD RIDE 