Heather Kirn Lanier | The Sun Magazine

Heather Kirn Lanier

Heather Lanier’s memoir Raising a Rare Girl is forthcoming in July from Penguin Press. After seven years in Vermont, she is adjusting to living and driving in New Jersey. She is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Rowan University. You can follow her on Twitter: @heatherklanier.

— From May 2020
Poetry

Two Weeks After A Silent Retreat

How quickly I lose my love / of all things. I nearly flick an ant / off the cliff of an armchair.

May 2020
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The R-Word

When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.

May 2015
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Teaching My Daughter To Walk

If my daughter had been born to the Ashanti people in Ghana, she would have been abandoned at the riverbank.

January 2014
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Twelve Reasons To Cry

Asking, “When was the last time you cried?” is even more personal than asking someone’s salary or weight.

January 2013
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hold Everything Lightly And Nothing Will Hurt Us

I’m driving north on I-95. The asphalt rushes beneath my tires, and when the speedometer hits eighty, the steering wheel vibrates in my hands, this little sedan protesting. The trees along the interstate burn orange and gold, and the northern half of the East Coast stretches ahead of me. I’m driving north on I-95 in October, which means I feel like someone is dying.

January 2012
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