The Girl and the Fire
On knowing when it’s time to get out of the house. Published in New York Times | May 4, 2024 When
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Putin and the dissident’s body: Greek tragedy and Navalny’s grave
How Sophocles’ wrenching tragedy “Antigone,” written 2,500 years ago, prefigured the aftermath of Navalny’s death A dictator withholds the body
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Because We’ve Done Bad Things
Essay contributed to Classics and Prison Education in the US (Routledge Press, 2021) about teaching Greek mythology to incarcerated men in
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What the Greek tragedy Antigone can teach us about the dangers of extremism
In a Greek tragedy written in the middle of the fifth century B.C., three teenagers struggle with a question that
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Take Three: Nick Flynn’s Triptych
One of the great American memoirs, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was adapted for the screen and renamed Being Flynn. The movie left fans and critics perplexed, but led Flynn to a shattering epiphany about his mother’s suicide. I wrote about the adaptation, and Flynn’s powerful post-film memoir, The Enactments, for Creative Nonfiction.
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Up The Creek
I didn’t know that my first foray into live storytelling was being recorded, much les that it would end up on YouTube. I’ve since performed Up the Creek at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. My story is adapted from a chapter in my memoir-in-progress, The Mirror Game.
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The Myth of the Moon
I was an anxious sixth-grader in a new school when the one teacher I liked gave our class an unusual assignment: write you own Greek myth. I handed mine in proudly – and that’s when the trouble I was already in got worse. Originally published in Superstition Review, an expanded form is now a chapter in my memoir-in-progress, The Mirror Game.
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Oriole Magic
Until Creative Nonfiction’s editor-in-chief Lee Gutkind invited me to contribute an essay to “The Anatomy of Baseball,” I didn’t even know that I had this story in me. But there it was, waiting to be tapped: how the Baltimore Orioles taught me that I could ‘play hurt’ through seemingly endless innings of graduate school, with electrical storms in my brain and an alcoholic husband at home.
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The Stakes are High: Tragedy and Transformation within Prison Walls
Teaching in a men’s maximum security prison has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. I wrote this piece about my first semester with Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education for Amphora, the national magazine of the Society for Classical Studies. They opened my eyes to what Greek tragedy teaches about tragedy’s collateral damage: the survival of the community.
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Selected Reviews
The Women’s Review of Books has been publishing for 35 years, providing a forum for book reviews and review essays on fiction and nonfiction works by women on a wide array of subjects. I was honored to be asked to write these two reviews for them, one of Alison Lurie’s Don’t Tell the Grownups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature, (“Arrested Development” ) and another on histories of the admission of women to military academies (“Arms and the Woman”).
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