When I was growing up, girls didn’t skateboard. Girls did the dishes. I wasn’t forbidden to skateboard, but it was a boy thing, a thing my brothers did. Back then, breaking into boy territory meant wearing pants to school. We had a long, sloping driveway beside our suburban house in central Florida. After school my brothers busted out the boards and...
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“I usually associate accordion music with Paris,” the audio story begins, “but I’m not in Paris. I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria… I teach here in Bulgaria, and usually I return to the States for the year-end holidays. But not this year.” Listen to the full audio story here.
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When I was about 8 years old, the scariest person I knew was a nun who taught fourth grade at my school: Sister Margaret Joseph. In my dreams Sister Margaret Joseph, or Maggie Joe as we called her, had a recurring, starring role. She mutated into a large bird with barbed wire talons and death-ray eyeballs that swooped down and pulled my hair for crimes...
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When I first moved to Flagstaff about 15 years ago, I taught 12th grade English at Northland Prep Academy. The class centered on close reading of a handful of texts. One of my choices was Tim O’Brien’s raw carnival of a book, “The Things They Carried,” a cluster of interlocking stories informed by O’Brien’s service in the Vietnam War. I have a freeze frame...
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This week, something a little different. Laura Kelly recorded this piece for Flagstaff Letter from...
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