A poet, Christle is pleasingly roving and idiosyncratic as she assembles and parses, ponders and distills the science of tears, the length of a cry, Sylvia Plath, elephant emotions, Ovid, Kent State, Ross Gay, Silas Mitchell, and the Bas Jan Ader film, I’m Too Sad to Tell You (among other things) into miniature packets of white-space interrupted prose.

After three decades, I was going to summon the courage to return to camps and to witness this story that I had lived, and to see how it had changed, and to let it ignite my memories so that I could say something important and helpful.

It’s November, and I am forty-seven, a newly single mother, driving home to North Carolina from a conference in Pittsburgh, where I spoke with other women writers on a panel called “A Wilderness of Her Own.” It’s drizzling in West Virginia, and I’m gazing at the fog and branches around me almost to my peril…

Until a few months ago, I thought Aleppo, Syria was one word. I’d never seen it in print, only heard it, and just once, from the lips of my grandmother. “I was born in Aleppo, Syria,” she said, and since there was no pause between the “o” and the “s” I figured she was referring…

This interview originally appeared as a web-exclusive feature for Image issue 63. John Terpstra has been in church since before he was born. “I have heard everything there is to say about the place, for and against; both its necessity and its redundancy. Have felt it all, in my bones,” he writes. Issue 63 of…

Patricia Hampl notes that successful memoir evidences a “hunger for the world,” yearning which “expands beyond its subject…into the endless and tragic recollection that is history.” Not long before her recent, untimely death, the memoirist Nuala O’Faolain referred to this hunger in an interview published in Ireland’s The Independent. Devastated by a terminal cancer diagnosis…

For the past two weeks now, I have been mulling over my pledge for this entry to discuss three recent major novels that I liked (and in the case of two, loved), but which also illustrate the narrative laziness that seems to characterize a lot of contemporary fiction. In case you’ve been racked with curiosity,…

“We are surprised if the doctor, by stealing some hours from his daily avocations, attains even moderate eminence in the path of literature.” –Edward Berdoe Incredulity, boredom, a patronizing “isn’t that nice”: these are a few of the responses I receive when folks in or out of the medical profession learn I write in my…

The definition of a good memoir, like St. Paul’s famous definition of love, is perhaps better fleshed out in considering what it does not do than what it does. A good memoir, for example, does not ignore the harsh truths of the past, but neither does it delight in placing blame; it does not enlarge…

Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion. Ed. by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont. I picked up Choice, an anthology of women’s stories of infertility, adoption, and abortion, while roaming a bookstore on Christmas Eve. Ever since a college course in reproductive ethics led me to convert from…