Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (2022)

One: heritage, childhood, family, origins
Prioritizing education, my parents managed to pay for my oldest brother to attend prep school for a few years. He still recalls the time when his class had to read out loud in turn from the popular racist children’s book The Story of Little Black ( Read more... )

I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home by Jami Attenberg (2022)

Part I: The Long and Winding Runway
4. ScarsSometimes we make art in the moment in relation to a trauma, when we need to make art about it in retrospect instead (65 ( Read more... )

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (2010)

2006: Introductory
This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me). But something very interesting happens to you in between ( Read more... )

Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein (2011)

PART 1: Hello, Cruel MeEveryone consciously or unconsciously changes who they are in response to their environment or to some relationship that they are negotiating at any given moment. Every life form does that. It’s a kind of phenotypic ( Read more... )

The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci Haines (2019)

Healing and Activism Child sexual abuse is deeply traumatizing. It is also very early training in power-over, in victim and offender, in coercion, in silencing, and in adapting to violence and domination. This is training related to all systems of oppression and ( Read more... )

The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci Haines (2019)

Part 3: Transforming: I, You, and We
Chapter 6: The Arc of Transformation-Overview We hold the definition of transformation as: you or we have transformed when our actions align with our values and vision, even under the same old pressures. The same old pressures ( Read more... )

Misfits by Michaela Coel (2021)

Introduction
What I am writing doesn’t change, but how I write it changes drastically. I find myself sitting with pain, with darkness. “How long,” I begin to wonder, “has my habit been to recount horror with a smile, standing in the light recalling tales of darkness?” Long enough that being here, with this darkness ( Read more... )

Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? by Pamela Keogh (2010)

2 - Emulating Jackie Style and Marilyn Style
RX-THE JACKIE LOOK When going for the Jackie, think East Coast sophistication with a soupçon of Paris style and a dash of the tomboy (okay, okay, we’ll stop with the Julia Child metaphors). The look is clean, classic, somewhat spare without being ( Read more... )

Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz (2021)

Introduction: The Other Kind of ChangeSubtracting is an action. Less is an end state. Sometimes less results from subtraction; other times, less results from not doing anything. There is a world of difference between the two types of less, and it is only by subtraction that we can get to ( Read more... )

Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews (2021)

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
-W. B. Yeats “The Stare’s Nest by My Window”

PART I
2. At times she found Lucy’s friendship stifling, though if pressed, she would have to admit that the extremity of Lucy’s devotion gave her a sense of comfort that far ( Read more... )