Featured Selections
From the Archives
On Not Believing
If you look hard enough for a reason to support something you want to believe in, you’ll find it. We select a belief as we do a mate, seeking for that which best reflects ourselves and our needs. Both are fragile and tenuous affairs, but how much more fervently one will hold onto some beliefs, after many loves have come and gone.
April 1974
My First Night At The Initiation Camp
This year the millet fields had been generous and the harvest good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the house roofs, where it waited to be put into the granaries, was over. Now, in the fallow dry season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters — to initiation.
August 1994My Jets Cap
One day a woman on a subway platform called out to me, “Go, Jets!” while raising her fist. Puzzled, I looked behind me and saw no one. Then I remembered: I was wearing a Jets cap.
January 2017Fighting Back
When I was nine, / my father began / telling me how to hurt / other boys. He said to / squeeze their upper lips / until their eyes watered / or twist their ears and / hold them low so you can / walk them like a dog.
February 2021Intensive Outpatient
On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.
September 2021Displaced
Graham Pruss On Why More People Are Living In Cars And RVs
To insist that people who have a mobile shelter are “homeless” not only denies that their shelter can be a home; it also has the potential to deny their humanity, because it insists that they are incapable of making a home.
September 2021
Our Rag-Bone Hearts
Richard was introduced to mental institutions when insulin and shock treatments were in their experimental heyday. Inappropriate and excessive use of these treatments dealt him the blow ensuring that he would never again plead for his home or protest his lot.
September 1993The Homeless
I was just rousted off the floor of Grand Central Station by two cops, one of each race. It didn’t occur to me to say, “But I’m waiting for the train to Poughkeepsie!”
November 1988
