Recent Work
That I’m proud to share
Saying No: Saved by Writing
In Colorado Springs for a wedding, with three hours to kill before we could check into our hotel, my 13-year-old and I decided to drive the 19-mile highway up Pike’s Peak. At the entry gate, the guard let us know that there’s a parking lot at the 17-mile mark where we can catch shuttles to the visitor center at the very top and eat the only donuts made at a 14,0000-foot altitude. We pulled away from the visitor center and made our way up the mountain in the rental Corolla. Things went fine for about the first 15 miles.
It’s Not the Cruelty That Gets You
I’m standing in my kitchen, washing dishes, with Jon Stewart on the TV to my left. He’s interviewing Chase Strangio from the ACLU and two sets of parents of trans kids.
I flash back two years to the 2021 Texas legislative session. My friend and I sat on a couch in a legislative office, nursing our worn-out feet, begging yet another legislative aide to convince his boss to vote against a bill that would designate us as child abusers if we choose to let our children access the gender-affirming medical care their doctors have recommended.
T minus 87 days
It’s Logan’s 12th birthday weekend. Tab’s still at Camp Lantern Creek. But Chris is home, which feels like a birthday present in and of itself. We’ve planned for Logan and Reva to celebrate with an escape room, sushi dinner, and a sleepover.
Reva’s always interesting. I noticed her intensity on her first day in Logan’s 2-year-old preschool class. She stood glued to her teacher’s side at recess, fists clenched, eyes glued on the other kids’ playground activity, studying and processing every social interaction. Neither her emotional power nor her observational skills have gotten any less intense in nine years. She’s one of my favorite kids to hang out with.
Ostrich Truths
I live in Texas. I’m the mother of two nonbinary trans teenagers. For the fourth time this year, the Texas legislature is considering bills that require trans kids to compete on sports teams that match the gender on their original birth certificate, effectively banning them from school sports. When I learned this, I buried my head under my covers like an ostrich.
Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand. This is a myth. The arguments for the anti-trans legislation contain many myths. Transwomen have an athletic advantage over CIS women. Having transwomen on girls’ teams is unfair to CIS girls. Trans girls aren’t really girls. Coaches will recruit boys to be trans so they can have winning girls’ teams. All untrue.
The Hermit Crab
Many of us feel challenged when trying to add humor to a darker memoir piece. Perhaps we don’t think of ourselves as funny, we don’t want to cheapen the depth of a traumatic experience with a formulaic or cheap joke, or we don’t think the experience was funny. We may worry humor is so subjective that our readers won’t get our jokes or won’t find them authentic and relatable.
The hermit crab essay offers an excellent opportunity to experiment with respectful humor as a tool to help readers engage with darker topics.
