Who's Afraid Of The Personal Essay? – Buzzfeed

"I read the New Yorker short story “Cat Person” as I read most things these days: in the bathtub with a beer, after my daughter had gone to bed. I enjoyed it. It was eerie and resonant and it brought up unsettling memories. Then I went online and realized that there was a significant literary conversation on Twitter lamenting how Kristen Roupenian’s story — about a brief online relationship that turns bizarre, creepy, and upsetting in person and ends badly — was being read as an “essay” or a “piece” or an “article.” Some people just seemed bothered that fiction wasn’t getting its due credit during its viral moment. But many seemed indignant that the essay — a form troublesome for its femininity and popularity — was tainting the purity of literary fiction."

Read more on Buzzfeed. 

Unfiltered: How motherhood disrupted my relationship with social media – Southwest

"My Facebook post about the birth of my daughter—written while still flush with adrenaline from 12 hours of natural labor, taking sips from a 36-ounce Buckeye Baby cup of ice water—was the most gushing, earnest thing I’ve ever shared on social media. It lacked any sheen of irony, any of the sly meta quality of millennial self-representation. I included seven photos, some featuring the baby still slick with gore. (Yes, I was that person.) Then I disappeared into a tiny wooden cabin in rural Ohio."

Read more at Southwest.

Between Mom and Stepmom – Longreads

"Meg first appeared to me as a nimbus of curly red hair, looming above my top bunk late at night. The hair, backlit and aglow, was so remarkable that I reached up and patted it as though it were a rare creature. Meg offered the nervous, extra-buoyant 'hi' of the girlfriend meeting the boyfriend’s kid for the first time. In reply, I stroked the hair."

Read the full essay on Longreads. 

Between work and motherhood, the space between the halves – The Washington Post

"'When the baby is 3,” my mom told me on the phone the other day, “a mother gets half her chi back.'"

I expelled a puff of pent-up hot air and asked, 'And the other half?' No answer."

Read more at The Washington Post.

On Oaxaca, Early Pregnancy, and Motherlands – Lit Hub

"On our first night in Mexico, at the 30-dollar-per-night Hotel Canada just off the Zócalo in Mexico City, Jorge dreams he’s being chased by a giant gorilla. “Subtle,” I say. “Scared of something?”

I am 12 weeks pregnant. As predicted by my mother and sister, who experienced the same pregnancy timeline, the fog of the first trimester lifts. It is dramatic as a curve in the road and around the corner, clarity, sun, the smell of meat finally enticing instead of repulsive. It comes at just the right moment, when we land in a city of a million taquerías."

Read more on The Lit Hub.

The Blue Jay's Dance: What Louise Erdrich Taught Me About Motherhood – The Paris Review

"Nine weeks into my pregnancy, in the middle of an Ohio woods lit gold with fall, I sat in a small, dark cabin and wept. I had no idea how to proceed and I also understood with a wrenching clarity that I could not turn back. I had no model for pregnancy beyond the asexual lady on the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, clad in neutral sweater and slacks, plain-faced in her rocking chair, an emblem of the dull, docile femininity demanded of American mothers. I was terrified of her blandness and of my own obsequiousness to that book, my careful noting of the iron content in dried fruit and my newfound pedantry about pasteurization. After a decade spent trying to prove my exceptionality, I found myself, in October of 2013, flailing in my newly discovered ordinariness. I felt my life, my identity, my future like shattered glass at my feet."

Reed the story on The Paris Review Daily.

Why don't people take writing about motherhood seriously? Because women do it – The Los Angeles Times

I am standing before a small audience in Columbus, Ohio, apologizing for what I’m going to read. “It’s about motherhood,” I say, then quickly qualify, “but you know, more than that! It’s about stories, and self, and the meaning of home.”

I have been doing this for months, explaining the book I’ve written as something along the lines of “about motherhood but not really,” until finally, in front of this audience, the absurdity of my intellectual scrambling strikes me. What male writer feels the need to atone for essays about, say, war? I imagine him hurrying to clarify: “But really they’re about the human struggle, triumph over adversity, and the meaning of self.”

Read more in The Los Angeles Times.

Wild River Blues – Vintage Short Original

"Jackson Samuel Menkedick, my little brother, has printed the Tao Te Ching on the back of a bunch of old Excel spreadsheets, looped them all together on a key ring, and placed this makeshift tome on the dash of his forest-green Honda Accord.

One weekend in June, while I am hunched over and sweating, cutting multiflora rose from the trails on my parents’ farm, he announces that he is going to spend the next year driving around the country, backpacking through the national parks, listening to thousands of hours of jazz, and reading the Tao. Instantly, I look up, freeze the clippers, and say, 'I am so coming with you.'"

Read the full Vintage Short Original.

The Making of a Mexican-American Dream – Pacific Standard

"I met Vianney Bernabé in the buffet line at the Fiesta Inn during the Fulbright orientation in Mexico City. I was struggling to contain my toddler, who was a hydra-like mess of limbs fighting to race freely up and down the corridor. “She’s beautiful,” Vianney said, and we started chatting. Vianney’s English is quintessential California: lots of “likes” and drawn out “yeahs” and “killed its,” with big vowels and sentences that curl at their ends into question-like realizations. She is petite, with a tensile, restless energy. Her wavy black hair is often corralled in a low ponytail, and her features are chiseled: fine cheekbones, fine collarbones, delicately contoured fingers. They are the features of a violinist, which she has been since she was eight years old."

Read more on Pacific Standard. 

The migrant's tale – Aeon

"I had been travelling around the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca in Mexico for months, talking to returned migrants – men who spent decades in laundromats in Los Angeles or shovelling snow off the highways of Indianapolis or serving burritos to the paunchy Republicans of Cincinnati – before I wound up in the tiny mountain village of San Pedro Cajonos, at Pedro’s hamburger stand. Painted bright blue and white, it was just big enough for a fridge, a grill and a man. Pedro was a scrawny, bony guy with wavy hair and a long crooked nose. He watched us approach with an intensity that made me feel exposed – odd in a rural region where many men retain layers of guardedness until mezcal or fiesta loosen them up."

Read more at Aeon.

Caught in the Middle – Guernica

At our wedding, my husband and I danced with a turkey. His sisters tossed plastic colanders, ladles, dish driers, and buckets into the upstretched arms of revelers; we performed la vibora de la mar, in which we clung to wooden chairs and the stiffened shoulders of relatives while a snake of guests writhed around and tried to topple us. We also grooved disco-style, in that mezcal-drunk, so-painful-to-view-later-on-video American way, to “Stayin’ Alive.” Our guests were a mix of indigenous and mestizo Mexicans and Midwestern Americans, and our ceremony was in both English and Spanish. It was the official merging of our families and cultures, just before we moved from Oaxaca to Pittsburgh so that I could begin graduate school.

Read more on Guernica.

Living on the Hyphen – Oxford American

My husband is from Guelatao de Juárez, a village of three hundred people in Oaxaca’s remote Sierra Norte, where tortillas are pressed by hand, bread is sold by burro, and he and his classmates once chased an infuriated bucking bull as part of a school assignment. I am from a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where crossing guards in safety orange escort gaggles of children across sleepy crosswalks, and impassioned debate erupts in City Council over cat leash laws.

Read more at Oxford American.

Notes from the Milk Cave – The Paris Review

“You are an animal,” my husband told me. We were in bed. The context was not what you’d expect. A baby was latched onto my right breast while the left leaked an opalescent waterfall of milk.

“I’m a mammal,” I said. This is about as deep as our conversations got in the first month of parenthood. 

Read more at The Paris Review.

Good Pilgrims – Harper's →

As you leave the Valley of Oaxaca and wind up the narrow switchbacks of unpaved mountain road, the sun loses its lowland sultriness and grows sharp. Roadside stands appear, selling small peaches, and bantam villages pass into and out of view, offering glimpses of hanging laundry, calla lilies in mossy streams, and men joking around in half-built houses.

Read more at Harper's.

The Rider's Prayer – Finalist, The Atavist's Digital Storymaker's Awards

Originally, the goal was to ride the bull to death. How long this took, we don’t know. Days, perhaps, of relentless bucking and lassoing, cheering and drinking, waiting and then rising to attention with clenched heart, until finally the knees buckled, the horns tipped, and the enormous jowls sagged into the dust. How many jinetes maimed, killed, in a crude ring of hand-hewn logs?

But no one needs to be reminded that, as French anthropologist Frederic Saumade put it, “the ritual of jaripeo dramatizes the relationship with death.” That’s why everyone is there to begin with: for that horrific, mesmerizing possibility of hoof crushing skull, or for the transcendence of the Indian jinete with arms raised and head thrown back saying fuck-all to his conquerors and the daily toil of his fleeting life.

Read more at The Atavist.

Reunion Island: Chantilly – The Common

We lived in a half-built villa by the sea. It was terrifically gaudy, and the most breathtaking place any of us had ever lived. The two long walls of the rectangular main room rose only to knee height and from there became screen-less windows, which could be closed by winding down shutters. We left them open day and night. To the west we could see the vast cobalt blue of the Indian Ocean all the way to the heat-white horizon, and to the east, Reunion Island rising in boxy pastel-colored buildings and palms to its foggy volcanoes and peaks. 

Read more at The Common.

The Beaten Track – Kindle Singles

In Borneo we didn't do anything. We didn't see the orangutans. We didn't see the world's biggest flower. We didn't sleep in a longhouse and get drunk on rice wine with the natives. We didn't go diving off Sidapan. We didn't visit Kuching's cat museum. We didn't stay on Pulau Tiga, where "Survivor" was filmed.

Read more at Kindle Singles.

My Own Mexican Revolution – World Hum

I was walking back from the grocery store, loaded down with bags, when a man came up the sidewalk. I looked down and away. He leaned towards me and whispered, “F**k me.”

The insistent pressure exploded. I lost it. “F**k YOU!” I shouted, and then continued, calling him a dog, a monkey, an animal, a barbarian, and any other disagreeable creature I could think of in Spanish.

Read more on World Hum.