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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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Jamy Bond’s Reflection on Writing
I find that writing about darker subjects is a rewarding way to contain my own difficult experience. Many of the details in Morphine are fiction, but the situation is very true. My sister and I fought at our father’s bedside over how much morphine to give him.
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Morphine
by Jamy Bond ~ As our father lay dying, I fought with my sister over morphine. I wanted to give him as much as possible, as much as the hospice nurse said that we could, and so, every two hours, at the chime of his Westminster mantel clock, I’d push a thin syringe between his…
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ONE WILD RIDE 