NONFICTION
 

Mama's Little Girl's Anorexic by Tomi Shaw
Mama does two things when she wakes up and the world stinks of worry: scrambles eggs or toasts bagels, depending on her mood. Every morning, now, there is bacon. This morning, it's an egg mood. So Mama wakes the children and one eats, the other pushes the food around on her plate and her skeletal elbows stab at the odors in the air...

Evolution by Maggi Sullivan Godman
November 26, 2003

Sleeping in my childhood room this week—new double bed, candlewick spread that was mother's, sheets edged with Aunt Winnie's tatted lace. Room feels neutral, comfortable, welcoming. No barbed wire memories here — the house where I grew up, now faced with new brick, turned forty-five degrees on its foundation toward the sunrise. Home, not home...

Dance by Ann Jones
My Aunt Aggie's best friend was a blind man. When I was four, she took me to visit him in his dim, sparsely furnished apartment.

"I feel sorry for Mr. Jacobs," I whispered into Aunt Aggie's ear...

Needed by B. Lynn Goodwin
"When are you planning on going to the grocery store?" my mother asked after our trip to the hairdresser followed by a late lunch at Emil Villa's. I'd taken her back to her condo, helped her open her mail, and I thought my day was over...

Southern Breeze by Wayne Scheer
Contrary to romance novels, there's nothing sultry about summers in the South. It's just plain hot. Hot and humid. So humid you don't fry an egg on the road, you poach it. So humid songbirds don't sing, they plead. So humid…well, you get the picture. I was thinking about this while sitting under a whirling ceiling fan trying to write a piece about summer in the South...

The Story Leah Told Me Last Night by Myra Margolin
It was at the movies, a Civil War epic — the large showers of skirts, the tightly buttoned, nearly suffocating collars, the nervous mustaches — that he let go of her hand...

Being Chinese by Camille Picott
Always send thank you cards. Pretend to like people even if you don't. Invite disenfranchised relatives over for the holidays.

"Be Chinese." I think my mother started saying those words to me when I was still an embryo. Throughout my life, I've heard her dispense advice to people not of Asian descent with the terms "Play Chinese," "Act Chinese," and "Think Chinese..."

Break Away by Janet Paszkowski

Go North north to the last frontier I say mousing over the expansive state of Alaska,
highlighting each of its five regions: north, interior, west, south central, south. North I say,
journey north to Point Hope...