Fiction/Nonfiction: nonfiction

  • Two Stories

    Two related and absolutely crushing pieces of flash nonfiction by a Toronto writer: “Let Me Pretend” and “He always says he will never leave me”. Domestic abuse is a big part of these stories. Five minutes of reading you’ll never forget.

  • Athens, Revised

    A piece about coming to understand, process, and live with trauma, even many years after the event.

  • The Word Disorder

    An upsetting story about a woman’s relationship with her body and the people around her

  • I Appear Missing

    After the pill that wrecks your life, you wake up poisoned on the salt flat of yourself. Your body no longer works the way it should but instead spasms, tears, throbs with the pain of cellular dissolution. There is no blood to wipe off your face, no open wound to tend or bandage.

  • Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for My Father

    The title’s pretty self explanatory, it’s a memoir of grieving a father who had all kinds of problems. It’s devastating: My father died in a hotel room, having been evicted from every apartment he ever had, and  fired from every job he ever had, and having alienated every single person he might stay with. It…

  • Twelve

    There’s so much in this memoir that I’m thinking about even days after reading it. It’s about growing up and the expectations and limitations of girls in society: Beware of flying for they will call you a witch and a bitch. They will use the straw from your broom as kindling for the fire they…

  • Shame

    <blockquote>I still hide, I suppose. Who wouldn’t? When you learn from an early age, from first schooling, that whatever you have inside you, isn’t quite right. That you’ll never fit in entirely. You’ll never cut straight with scissors or learn to play tether ball with the other kids. Even, years later, when none of this…

  • The Cheese Plate

    This one goes to a lot of places I didn’t expect. It’s ostensibly about the difficulty of ending stories, but it’s also about self-doubt and the human desire for comfort and tidiness.

  • Hideous Miracles

    It’s about suicide, homicide and divine intervention, for better and for worse. It’s riveting, gutting stuff.

  • Oblivion

    About Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, brought on as a sidekick to Long Covid. It’s eye-opening and terrifying: During my first year of being bedbound, I enter a decline that seems like it will never end. I’m in free fall, my baseline sinking lower and lower each month, and I can only watch as it continues, this…