In 2015, on a road trip to visit my family in Canada, Google Maps took my husband and me straight to the site of the capture, two hours earlier, of escaped murderer David Sweat. I wrote about that, and then I wrote about a whole bunch of other things, and it became an essay about my vicarious trauma as a…
About American Breakdown
All told, I was sick for a quarter of a century. Just launching into adulthood when the illness first struck, I was 21 years old and bedridden—an old lady in a young woman’s body. The fatigue felled me. I couldn’t hold a book. Talking on the phone wiped me out. Walking a block to the corner store wrecked me. I took baths rather than stand in the shower. I stopped brushing my teeth at night.
I felt utterly alone until the day I stumbled upon Jean Strouse’s 1980 biography of Alice James—the chronically ill sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James—and felt I had met my kindred spirit. Why was I sick? Why was she? A doctor told me I was “just depressed,” and researchers called Alice’s illness “fashionable.” But was it really so simple? Were these illnesses simply the psychosomatic expressions of conflicted psyches? Or was there something more to the story?
A New Website! And Updates from the World of Monarchs and Mammograms
I have some updates to share about both mammograms and monarch butterflies, but first, a happy announcement. The judges for the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund have awarded me a grant to afford me time to work on my book-in-progress, One Canary Sings. The fund bequeaths small grants to feminists in the arts, and I am honored and energized…
The Butterfly Effect
I’m pleased to announce that “The Butterfly Effect”–which was first published in Creative Nonfiction, where it won the Robert Fragasso Animal Advocate Award for the Best Creative Nonfiction Essay About Animals, and then went on to win a Pushcart Prize–is now available online. Click here to read about monarch butterflies, the Butterfly Lady of Butterfly Town, USA, and so much more.
5 Questions from Orion’s Scott Gast
“I started out researching an article about mammograms, and in the process I uncovered all of this other mind-blowing information about Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the pink ribbon campaign. I even created a file called ‘Hypocrisy, Doublespeak, and Conflicts of Interest.’ Later, that file got subdivided into three separate files: ‘Monsanto,’ ‘American Cancer Society,’ and ‘Pinkwashing.’ Read more…
Exposed: The Mammogram Myth and the Pinkwashing of America
I had not yet turned 40 when I read the startling statistic that for every 2000 women who submit to ten years of annual mammograms, one will have her life prolonged and ten will be over-diagnosed and treated unnecessarily. But two years later, when my nurse practitioner urged me in for a baseline, I acquiesced. A call-back led to an…
March Against Monsanto, May 25, 2013
It was a raw, windy day in Portland, Maine, as protesters like me gathered in Monument Square to raise their voices against Monsanto. To our great relief, the rain held off. Sadly, the PA system wasn’t loud enough to carry over the crowd. I longed for Occupy’s “people’s microphone,” a call and response that encourages brevity while inviting the whole…
A Pushcart Prize!
Well. I am downright delighted to report the happy news that my Creative Nonfiction essay, “The Butterfly Effect,” has won the coveted Pushcart Prize and will be published in The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses, coming out in November of this year. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Charles Wright says, “A Pushcart Prize selection is one of the very best…
“The Butterfly Effect,” a story told live at Slant
Four times a year, the Telling Room and Space Gallery host Slant, Portland’s own version of the Moth Radio Hour, an evening of true stories told live without notes. This winter, they invited me to share a story, and on February 10th, I told a story based on my award-winning essay, “The Butterfly Effect.” You can watch it here: The…