Lately, my kids have been shushing me. In restaurants, on city sidewalks, even at home when I get a little too animated telling a story. I remember, actually, doing the same to my mother. Wanting to disappear her in moments that felt like too much. When one of my kids initially shushed me, I felt embarrassed, like maybe I really was too much. Was I too …

“Make your characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.” - Kurt Vonnegut

The night of my father’s death, on July 5, 2011, after the funeral home men with their jingling keys hooked to their belt loops drove away with his body in the long black car, I sat cross-legged on my parents’ deck in a white wicker chair with a navy-blue floral cushion, watching bats swoop low around the Hawthorn tree and clutching a bottle of Hop Devi…

It was March of 2023, and before bedtime, ten-year-old K. pulled on his Pokemon pajama pants and hopped into his bed where I was already snuggled under the covers, Percy Jackson and The Sea of Monsters open to our page. He tucked against my side and pulled his Squishmallow boba tea to his chest, clamping it under his chin. I began to read, but I didn’t …

In October of 2019, I saw a psychic in Sedona. At the time, my former partner and I were on a break, and I was on a trip with two dear friends, searching for answers that might guide my heart and mind into a steadier place. The psychic worked out of the iconic purple building on the corner of Sedona’s main street—the

The evening sun draped velvety over the tall dry grasses around Wonderland Lake in north Boulder. It was April of 2016, the darkness mere centimeters away, bringing a wet taste to the air, the orange orb slipping behind the foothills. This in-between time, a cradle, a pause.

The Layers We Shed

Over the two weeks between Substack posts, I collect ideas. Mainly in the Notes app on my phone, scrawled at random times throughout my days when something strikes me.

There’s a stretch of time after something ends and before something else begins that’s hard to describe. The liminal. No one really talks about it. There’s no ceremony for it, no “how to” guide. It’s not quite grief. Not yet living into what’s next. It’s the part where you feel emptied out but still somehow overfull. Disoriented, porous, unfinished.