Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants,...

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and...

We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles,...

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

You have what it takes! Believe! You are the one with the dream. You own it. And you will walk through the open doors. Nothing can stop you.. Risk, even if you make mistakes. So...

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

Your past doesn’t dictate what your future will be.

Shut your mouth – there’s a bus coming.

confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much – it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s...

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I...

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.

He loves me, he loves me not. How many flowers must I kill before he loves me?” ~He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.

What character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where...

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

I know what it’s like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.

Acts of love, for me, are leaps of bravery.

I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple.

Tatiana is a ridiculously curvy thing of dreams, with smooth succulent thighs, long strawberry blond cascading beneath a teal bandana, and a nympho sparkle in her eyes that says pick me, lick me, spank me,...

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging...

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike–“I’m...

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.

I’ve been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept.” Dear Deb”I...

guilt” didn’t belong in the same sentence unless, say, you were referring to how you felt about the starving children in Africa.

He wasn’t a great man, but he had a great life.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking,...

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard...

Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another’s experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some...

the voice of the soul” amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin...

…I am about eight years old when I first become aware of being other–foreign, outside, separate. Because this lesson comes from my own family, it resonates deeper and truer than playground taunts ever have.

Become your own soulmate. Then you’ll always have someone watching your back, and you’ll always have someone who loves you.

Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in...

I love that there’s no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more....

I don’t know where to start,” one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can....

The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand....

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history.

While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.

a little inflammation” apparently qualifies as sound diagnosis.

This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling....

Change the world so that nothing else is changed.

As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in...

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from thissame old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks....

We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.

But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

My father’s haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory.

Chris didn’t need to learn how to conquer fear. He had to embrace it, walk with it and listen to it.

Everyone’s a knucklehead at one point or another.