Posts Tagged ‘Allison Backous Troy’
Pride and Progress
October 21, 2011
My family moved to Sauk Village when I was eight years old. The town rode the border between Illinois and Indiana, an hour south of Chicago; its town motto was Pride and Progress, stamped on a blue concrete sign flanking the intersection of Sauk Trail and 394, the westernmost edge of town. We didn’t know…
Read MoreMy Own “Rex Manning Day”
October 3, 2011
After my parents’ divorce, my mother moved us kids to a trailer on the northeast side of town. It was long and narrow, like a ship’s galley, and the wallpaper’s thin brown stripes seemed to carve themselves into the drywall. The trailer never felt like home, never felt like a place you could settle. We…
Read MoreA Heart in Two Places
September 24, 2011
The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities. —D.J. Waldie, Holy Land During the time I spent completing my MFA, I worked for months on a single essay about the south suburbs of Chicago, where I spent my youth and young adulthood. I had just moved to Michigan, and…
Read MoreThe Work is Calling
September 13, 2011
“It was only love we were looking for….” —Patty Griffin Part of my task at Good Letters, for myself, is to work on my first book. With the ways that daily life squashes my writing time, I’m trying to see these posts as ways into my memoir. The book that I’ve wanted to write, and…
Read MoreA Heart in Two Places
August 24, 2011
The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities. —D.J. Waldie, Holy Land During the time I spent completing my MFA, I worked for months on a single essay about the south suburbs of Chicago, where I spent my youth and young adulthood. I had just moved to Michigan, and…
Read MoreCancer and the Cloud of Witnesses
August 4, 2011
As I type this, the band-aid on my back is sliding off, the Vaseline from the dermatology office a slick, clear ooze spread below my shoulder blades. I had to get a mole removed, and the daily care the resulting wound requires is both minimal and difficult: I’m having a hard time reaching my arms…
Read MoreA Conversion Story
July 14, 2011
The word “conversion” reminds me of Anne Lamott, whose own Damascus Road story is one that I love telling my students: Lamott recalls the fevered days after an abortion when, drunk and spotting blood, she noticed a stray cat sitting at her doorstep. The cat followed Lamott everywhere, down the street and to the liquor…
Read MoreJoining the Dance
June 23, 2011
Having thought, for many years, that I’d spend my life aching for what I’m about to say, it feels strange to write these words down. But I’ve spent the past five months knowing it, knowing it to my bones. I am in love. And there aren’t enough poems or pop songs to capture what I…
Read MoreThe Inscape of Grief
May 27, 2011
Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her? —Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” Last Wednesday, my grandmother, my father’s mother, died. She had been fighting lung cancer…
Read MoreBuddy and Me
April 20, 2011
As I write, my dog Buddy is nestled next to me, wrapped in an afghan, asleep. It is a rare moment, this silence, the sweetness of my dog sleeping next to me, his quiet breath punctuating the air. I don’t know how to write about a dog without sounding dorky or mushy, but I know…
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