I wrote this essay in 2009 for a group blog I shared with five other women writers from college. It was first published in PANK 6 and it was the first time I wrote about my father. This is the essay that started the journey toward writing my book. Thank you for reading with me.…

First of all, thank you to Steve Himmer for the opportunity to serve as the November Writer-In-Residence for Necessary Fiction. The opportunity to share the work of writers I admire is greatly appreciated. At times, I’ve described myself as a literary fangirl. I’m certain that could be taken in a number of unintended ways, but…

It’s the final day of October and so ends my residency at Necessary Fiction. For the past 31 days I’ve posted essays by fiction writers exploring the Other Things We Do to keep ourselves whole as writers. What I learned is that the creative process is a tricky thing. We need to leave it to…

Michael Kimball hits a three-run homer over the right fielder’s head. (for Michael Bowen) As a kid, I loved watching baseball on television, listening to it on the radio, and playing it anywhere that resembled a field. I could get completely lost in the game. It started when I was little and would hit those…

In the summer at my Cape house, I often invite — probably more like coerce — house and dinner guests to paint a 3×5” or 4×6” canvas to add to my “gallery,” a long hallway of small paintings affixed to the wall with Velcro and a staple gun. We paint on the deck on spread-out…

So, I walk. I try to name each sun-bright thing, memorize crepe myrtle by the National Federation for the Blind building, loose shingles off the Formstone-clad rowhouse three doors’ from mine — off by heart, saved for rainy days — only the starling drift and wren call catch me away. Forget the pit-bull mixes and…

I learned how to knit when I was eight. Most beginners start with a scarf and knit their rows back and forth. My mother started me on double pointed needles, which means I learned to knit in the round first. I knit a poncho for my Barbie. In memory it took me two years to…

“Fly fishing,” Wikipedia tells us, “is an angling method in which an artificial ‘fly’ is used to catch fish.” To catch fish so that s/he can then release them, the fly fisher(wo)man must make something artificial—feathers, fur, thread, a barbless hook—appear Real, a skill that involves getting things Right: the cast, the presentation, the fly…

“This could be one of the last good days of summer.” My husband and I start saying this in early August. Never mind that in Milwaukee, where we live, summer often stretches all the way through September. The sentence is code for: “Drop everything, let’s get out on the lake.” Another code phrase is, “Flat…

I was standing at a stoplight with a few MFA students after my fiction workshop let out, making small talk about how we were each planning to spend our Thursday evening. A group of them were getting ready to grab a quick bite at the student center before driving half an hour to hear our…

When I was five years old, I begged my parents to let me take piano lessons. No one else in the family was interested in the massive, old upright piano sitting in our living room. A converted player piano, I may have been as interested in the piano at that time—with its doors above the…