Better next year: when bad holidays make good stories
I really enjoy talking about real stuff with smart people so it was a pleasure to talk about hard holidays with JJ Lee and Ali Hassan on the Next Chapter. This conversation took me in some […]
Better next year
I’m so grateful to JJ Lee for encouraging me to write a Christmas story for BETTER NEXT YEAR An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies. My story Tortue de Noel will be in this anthology of stories that […]
Conversations about secrets and story-telling
First there was the silence, The years and years of silence. Then slowly there were a few stories. I let it slip that my entire alternative school use to go skinny dipping together. That I used to be some kind of radical. That I was writing a book. Then finally there was the book. Red Star Tattoo. And now, as though to make up for those years of silence there are so many conversations. Conversations about secrets and story telling, revolution and resilience, getting through and moving on.
Red Star Tattoo Book Trailer
I said when I began writing this book I would embrace all the learning and growth opportunities that the work gave me. I’ve battled with honesty, fear, ego, and now….IMovie. Here is a quick visual synopsis […]
On late bloomers, family traditions and the reasons we tell stories
“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ” ― Sharon Olds I come from a family of late bloomers, which naturally makes me happier the older […]
Room Magazine – “Halloween 1973”
We were walking down the road towards the full moon.
A blue pick-up truck passed us. In the back of the truck were a witch, a fairy, and a ghost. I was Little Red Riding Hood. My sister was sixteen, so she wasn’t anything at all.
By the time we got to the school, the Halloween party was already half-over. There were no more goody bags, or chocolate or even candy corn. All that was left were hard orange toffees wrapped in waxy Halloween paper, and black jaw breakers. The punch was warm and watery pink, with the cherries all sunk to the bottom.
Countdowns
There was a sign over the door at the safe house in Brooklyn that told us how many days were left. Left until the revolution was supposed to start. That sounds crazy now, that feels crazy […]
Three thousand miles and an outstretched thumb
Before I became a teenage Bolshevik I was a hippy kid, hitchhiking three thousand miles from Quebec to California with a member of our commune. “When the drivers slowed down to look, I tried to catch […]
Flipping the bird
Getting the finger from an 8 year. Is that funny or fucked up? When you work with kids you learn it can be both. Sometimes it has to be. Her tiny little hand shaking in rage. […]
One day and then another
This past week was pretty hard for me. Even after sixteen years of working with vulnerable kids, kids beaten up by poverty, cultural genocide and addiction, it is still hard to know that a kid who is talking about suicide can’t get a bed in a hospital for a night. To know that when you call for help for a kid what you’re going to get is cops with guns questioning them. Some cops are nice and some are not but everything about them: their handcuffs, their tazers, tell a kid they’re in trouble. And after they talk to the kid they will more than likely leave them behind because they know when they get to the hospital they won’t admit them. “I’m happy to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours until they send her home,” the cop tells me. “But my boss is not going to like it.” Sometimes even if the hospital takes them they release them a few hours later in a taxi alone.
It’s like a kid coming to you with a broken arm and having to tell them: It’s not broken enough.