The Therapist Who Saved My Life
The following appears in Creative Nonfiction’s anthology of writing on mental illness, Same Time Next Week. My therapist got off the bus with a backpack, a box of matches, and a shovel. She walked...
View ArticleWhite Matter
In 1935, eminent scientists from around the world converged in London for the Second International Neurological Congress, an event that would one day spiral down to a small point: an apartment in...
View ArticleAlmost Everything Very Fast, by Christopher Kloeble
Christopher Kloeble will be appearing as a featured writer at the Festival Neue Literatur. The following excerpt is translated by Aaron Kerner. Almost Everything Very Fast Five Fingers Up in the sky,...
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Avoid the Pathways to Psychic Pain
David Foster Wallace had a cavity. He’d never had one before—but now the dentist who’d always praised him for his pristine teeth was telling the 14-year-old boy that he was not invulnerable. “I...
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How a Self-Published Writer of Gay Erotica Beat Sci-Fi’s Sad Puppies at their...
When I was a little kid, my mother would come into the bedroom I shared with two of my sisters each night and read us a book before we slept. Inevitably, a minor fight would erupt over whose bed beside...
View ArticleShelter in Place
We are at The Owl. Tess out on the floor, Seymour running his door, and me, I’m working my bar. It’s crowded with students, this the night before spring break begins. An Emerson tradition, one last...
View ArticleWhy Do We Love Watching Women Self-Destruct?
Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Whitney Houston, Britney Spears—they were all women whose personal scandals overshadowed, and sometimes swallowed entirely, their own artistry. “Women who...
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The Haunting of Shirley Jackson
Like all good ghost stories, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House sets a trap for its protagonist. In the classic version of the form, as established by the British writer M.R. James, the hero...
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Confronting Anxiety Through Baseball
Baseball is not a sport for the anxious. Unlike basketball or hockey, it’s impossible for any one player to get lost in the crowd. In that way, baseball is a solitary endeavor. Players stand at their...
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Mental Illness is Not a Capital Crime
Two and a half decades after the 1991 beating of Rodney King was broadcast on TV, another bystander captured video of a different beating by the side of a Los Angeles freeway, featuring another Black...
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