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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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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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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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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I’d like Christmas better without You-Know-Who.
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