When my mom died, my sister and I inherited a nearly-paid-off house we couldn't afford in a neighborhood we couldn't live in. It was also the house she had just died in, the house she had been sick in, and we were both teenagers. We sold it. Immediately, we said we wanted to sell. The remaining adults handled it, quick and quiet.

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The churches putting up these nativities are declaring that they refuse to be complicit in the very same violence that threatened Jesus at his birth.

"Man, man, Johnny Carson..." the cashier trailed off, glancing at the magazine emblazoned with Johnny Carson's handsome, smiling face before passing it forward into the pile of organic peanut butter, cinnamon toast crunch, dried apricots, etc. Behind my mother, I stiffened. In front of me, she did as well, though the verbiage would probably be different. Tensed, perhaps. Absolutely sprung back, about to…

My new memoir, Fit Into Me, is about trying to write Fit Into Me: A Novel in the aftermath of a mild traumatic brain injury. It documents the years of my life, from the end of my MFA program into t…

I am a mish-mash of two people whose deaths started with losing their minds. And while I have no idea how I'll go, I've always suspected it's too much to ask for some clean, sane break. What I've learned is that there is maybe one thing you can keep, in madness, if you devote your all to holding it tightly.

I've literally never met someone so funny. Year one of life just passed, I was changing her diaper. She pointed down after I cleaned her off and said, "Vadino?" "Vagina," I corrected. We were learning body parts. "No," she responded immediately. "No?" A grin cracked across her face, a wild glee alighting in her eyes, and then she growled out "VaaaaaDINO, raaawr!" and wiggled her hips. I fucking died, y'all. I absolutely died. So did she. Laughed so hard, in fact, she peed all over herself, the couch, and my pants.

I went to That Certain Bridal Store, you know, the doomed one, pretty much the minute I got engaged. Say Yes to the Dress was on our living room TV constantly at that time, and I was an ADHD addled, freshly sober motherfucker with a dead mom, a dying dad, a kid I'd just got back, and a history I was positive should already be…

There's been so much fucking grief, this year. All I have to do to remember that is come here and scroll. I see the past year in aborted, half-finished openings, cut off unless I click, and so many are frustrated at best. At best, that desperation for satisfaction, for an expectation to just go met for once. At worst, another draft about someone dying.

"Change? Something about ME? I would change nothing!" I shout, and then I do a six foot vertical leap, ending on a triple flip. No, but really. Like all AFAB people, I look in the mirror and the physical dislikes jump out like tasks I should be working on, for the benefit of my husband, for the benefit of my children, my grandmother, the world itself.

I have this dream that I'd be myself again, more fully than possible. I'd write, and I'd keep writing. I'd have the night again, the way I do when I'm manic, that delicious slice of silence I can do what I want with. I wouldn't be tired. I wouldn't be tired. I wouldn't be tired. Motherhood takes something from you. It gives you so much, they say! So much. Sure. It also takes. I'm homesick for silence, and time, and the ability to do things for myself without guilt.

The genres have lately divided like they think they're continents rather than dialects, and the ground is shifting. I'm not in any way, shape, or form claiming to have invented the wheel. If anything, I'm just trying to figure out how to point at it. Look! There it is! We've been saying quite a lot with Sc-Fi since the beginning of time.