Legacies

On Not Wanting Children

Why are the childfree by choice such a threat?

Nov 15, 2022
On Houses, Ghosts, and “Good Bones”

When we moved out of our house, I wondered: How much of our presence is still there? How much do we haunt the place?

Aug 11, 2022
Small Patches of America: When America’s Suburban Romance Is Undone

In other words, the suburbs are equated with whiteness because they were designed to be.

Jun 30, 2022
In a Time of Mass Mourning, Grief Stories Are a Lifeline

In our constrained culture where public, raw grief is not socially acceptable, I fear that grief stories are being asked to do too much.

May 24, 2022
My First Taste of Protest In a Thai Roadside Café

Will it challenge how they feel about the kingdom? The nationalistic pride of what it means to be Thai?

Apr 21, 2022
The Curious Lives of Ski Migrants

Look closely and you see something that has been left behind, mourned, and reassembled from new parts.

Apr 18, 2022
My Father Tried to Preserve Nature—And the Best of Him—In His Writing

My father has been gone for so long now. There’s nothing for me to escape anymore. I read his book to try to believe him again.

Apr 12, 2022
The Lightning Strike That Burned Through My Family

My mother’s body, one in a million, became a conduit for lightning, and, three months later, it became a conduit for me.

Feb 10, 2022
My Mother Told Stories Through Hmong Embroidery, I Use the Pen

Naturally, the first person I wrote about was my mother.

Feb 08, 2022
After the Family Cabin Burned

But there was also the feeling of home, and these feelings shiver still in my core.

My Father Taught Me to Pursue Excellence. Coffee Taught Me About Satisfaction.

An obsession with excellence creates an unfortunate binary: all or nothing.

I Rediscovered Who My Grandfather Was by Reading His Book

To know him beyond the frail, serious man who struggled to speak to his family was such a rare and incredible gift.

From Sicily, With Love

My father never took me to Sicily himself, and I yearned to go. I yearned to know the people he knew—and one person he’d never met.

Dec 14, 2021
Longing for the Magic of My Childhood Home

Frarieville was the safe space on which I could plant my flag.

Dec 02, 2021
Searching for Home in the South with Carson McCullers

Quietly, I clung to what I knew: how to be an outsider in the South.

Seeing Cuba from a Parking Lot in Miami

I used to think Miami was a kind of carbon copy of Havana. But I was wrong. We are not a copy, but a conversation.

Nov 03, 2021
In the Shadow of Saris: Exploring Identity Through Memory and Dislocation

Only after I left a home where there were many women who might have helped me did I realize the sari represented more than a cultural announcement.

Jan 26, 2021
Little Girl, Big Dinosaur Costume

Fashion is about more than looking good, or feeling comfortable—it’s about how your clothes tell your story.

Oct 29, 2020
What Is Left, What Is Held, What Is Grown As Roots

Always the most vulnerable will die. There will be others, too, but it begins there. And we see, in slow moving real time, whose life is valued, whose life is not.

Sep 30, 2020