We took a bus down to Dallas, TX, probably forty or fifty of us, and spent the night praying for our families in a large hotel room.

I 

I wake up one morning and want to read Woolf. Being a woman writer. Is being a woman-who-is-a-writer something to consider,... more

A burrito, historically, was a food of convenience, much like the sandwich—a transport vehicle for the meal itself...

It has bullet holes in it.

Or rather, it’s meant to look... more

Versace "Medusa" V-Neck T-Shirt

This is the first article of designer clothing I ever owned. A month or so after... more

Imagine if you can, "a dirty house in a gutted world," the poet said, which what the poet said is precisely what I saw when I stopped to look around while listening to reports from the BBC and ironing my favorite lavender blouse. 

In November 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released Skyrim, a gigantic, multi-console fantasy role playing game set in Bethesda's larger Elder Scrolls universe. Also in November 2011, I was just starting my graduate program at the University of Washington. I watched the footage on YouTube and told myself that after grad school, after I was done studying literary nonfiction and contextualizing and living an examined life, I would play the hell out of this game.

rich

in maybe middle school i started telling my teachers, on the first day of class, that i’d prefer to be... more

Frasier Crane never gets what he wants because Frasier Crane is a horrible person.

Amanda is in her first year of a new... more

We parked on Michigan Avenue like we always would, walking hand-in-hand through Corktown, the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. We... more

We'd stood in the rain to watch the fireworks, my girlfriend Linda and I, and it was perfect. It was Boston and it was the Fourth of July... more

WEDNESDAY

got off the airplane, spencer landed like an hour ago. either he is in the... more

Lone Star bottles were a dollar that night, and a leather-clad, hair-shaking woman howled “Whipping Post” on the stage.  You took down... more

I fell in love with a woman who had a face like she meditated.

Tabitha Blankenbiller is revisiting the games of her youth, replaying them and writing semi-regular column for... more

On August 23, 2013 I checked into an inpatient treatment center in middle-of-nowhere Ohio to get off heroin and... more

It’s been a big month for Mary Miller. Even prior to today’s release of her debut novel,... more

I had no business in a haberdashery store that expensive as a seventeen-year-old high school student most recently employed as a dishwasher; even less so as a recently self-declared man, an until-three-weeks-ago woman, lurking timidly, covetously, in the racks of ties.  

I am at the back of the ConEx with a broom in my hand, smoking a... more

Tabitha Blankenbiller is revisiting the games of her youth, replaying them and writing semi-regular... more

To be honest, there were other books that had as great an impact on me, but I don’t have access to those authors (Bret Easton Ellis – Lunar Park, Elizabeth Wurtzel – More, Now, Again, W. Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage)..

My favorite video game lives in an ark. Surrounded by artifacts packed in a Rubbermaid tote box, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was next on my Summer of the Video Game list of must-plays. 

We crowd around the flame, we extend our naked hands, we feel the joints in our fingers warm and crack. The smoke stains our jackets and hats with its smell.

A lady doesn’t need makeup unless it’s the war paint she’s putting on to end me. 

Yesterday, Barry Graham favored us with his Top 10 Cities to Get Drunk... more