Like Being Held
Bi All Means, May 2023
I have an essay in the third and final issue of Bi All Means, a zine celebrating bisexuality compiled and edited by Julia Koschler of the Munich Zine Library. The focus of this issue is on Joy and Community. All proceeds donated to Bi+ Pride Hamburg and to mutual aid.
In My Room
Hit the Decks, May 2021
I wrote about being stuck at home during the pandemic and the ways in which it was like being a 12-year-old metal nerd back in the 80s. Published in Hit the Decks, a magazine about music and cassette culture.
The Summer of Dead Birds
Utne, July 2019
Let’s get this out of the way: I am something of an Ali Liebegott superfan. It started 13 years ago with The IHOP Papers, her novel about a lovesick lesbian waitress named Francesca that I read almost straight through one hot summer afternoon while I sat at my desk. It’s a wonderful book: heartbroken and messy, packed with arresting images, so funny it hurts. Her next novel, Cha-Ching!, addressed the subject of addiction, and though the main character in that one was more mature, she was still just as tough and funny as I needed her to be. “She’d … always wanted to make a mood ring for alcoholics—the rainbow of colors could translate into words like lonely, and sorry, and marry me.”
Memoir as Addiction
The Millions, June 2018
I reviewed Michelle Tea's fine collection of essays, Against Memoir, for The Millions.
Pizzazz, or The Language of Memory
Utne Reader, April 2014
"You might not think about it much, but language and linguistics are all around you. And that’s precisely what author Katie Haegele illustrates in Slip of the Tongue (Microcosm Publishing, 2014). Whether it’s used to create art or simply to communicate, language is an integral part of the world we live in. Through interviews, research, and musings on today’s digital world Haegele breathes life into the contemporary state of the English language. The following excerpt, from “Either You Have It, or You Don’t,” links language and long-term memory with just one word: pizzazz."
Leanne Shapton: The Character Artist
The Comics Journal, December 2014
Leanne Shapton is an artist and writer whose work I admire because it's nuanced, intelligent, and varied in a way that's always surprising. (It's pretty, too.)
Welcome to my Dollhouse
Pennsylvania Gazette, March/April 2013
One day, for no reason that I can remember, I decided to get it out of my mom’s storage closet and bring it back to my apartment. It weighs a ton and I don’t drive so I had to ask my sister Liz to give me a ride, but once it was at my place I could look at it a while, and after I did I started to think about fixing it up again.
Review of Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
Philadelphia Inquirer, 2014
When we first meet Nora Webster, she’s answering her door; it’s a straggler, one of the last of the callers who have come to express their condolences about her husband. The visitors are pesty and Nora is weary of them.
Girls on the Street, and other writing about clothes
Utne Reader, 2013
In 2013 I wrote a column for the Utne Reader. It was supposed to be about secondhand and sustainable fashion, but most often it was about clothing and identity, thrift store shopping, feminism, and movies I love.
How to Make a Found Poem
The How-To Issue, 2012
The How-To Issue was a blog project started by Molly Templeton in response to The New York Times Book Review’s 2012 How-To Issue, which featured mostly cis-gendered dudes. Templeton called for how-to pieces of all kinds that were written by "women writers, genderqueer writers, and writers who do not identify with a binary gender."
Overdressed: Elizabeth Cline on Fast Fashion, Overconsumption, and What We Can Do About It
Bitch Media, July 2012
Journalist Elizabeth Cline wrote an important book called Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion about the unsustainability of retailers like H&M and Forever 21.
Cute Dress
The Strumpet, Issue 1
The Strumpet is a comics anthology edited by Ellen Lindner and Kripa Joshi. A story I wrote, illustrated by the comics artist Mardou, was included in the first issue, which got a nice review in The Comics Journal.
Street Sweepers: Hollaback! and the global surge in antiharassment activism
Bitch Media, Fall 2011
Before the Women's March and the Slutwalk, there was the Hollaback! movement.
Review: It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image + Text Work by Women Artists & Writers
The Comics Journal, July 2011
Lisa Pearson has put out a number of rigorous and beautiful titles on her small press Siglio, which specializes in books about visual art that lies at the intersection of literature.
Geonoshing: Foraging For Food in the City
Philadelphia Inquirer, 2011
I've always marveled at just how much "nature" there is in the city, so I was excited to learn about Philadelphia's urban foragers, whose goal is to feed themselves and others with edible plants they've found within the city limit. For this article I followed a Google map that foragers had pinned with locations of fruit trees and other plants to see what I could find to eat—for free.
Found Things
My Red Couch And Other Stories on Seeking a Feminist Faith, ed. Claire E. Bischoff. Wipf & Stock, 2010
My Red Couch is an anthology of essays about religion and feminism. My contribution is about prayer, found poetry, and getting my wisdom teeth removed.
How a local poet publishes, from zines to the Internet
The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 2009
Last year I wrote a batch of poems, one for every letter of the alphabet and each inspired by an obsolete word of English. I didn't send them out to journals for their consideration, as many poets would. Instead, I made a little book. I asked a friend to design and typeset it, which he did, beautifully, and another friend to print it. This friend, Taylor Ball, is from Virginia but lives in Philadelphia now. He runs Parcell Press, a company that distributes zines and other independent media. At some point he acquired a printing press and learned to use it, so now he can consider himself a publisher, too.
Read the rest of the essay here
The Way We 'Read' Now
Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 2008
For this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I looked at the narrative of video games and the ways in which digital technology is changing our conceptions of literacy.
Open Source Embroidery
Philadelphia Inquirer, 2008
I wrote a regular series for the Philadelphia Inquirer called DigitaLit, for which I reported on literature and art projects that lie at the intersection of traditional storytelling and new technologies. This is one of the columns.
In talking about the idea for her new-media project, Open Source Embroidery, British curator and media researcher Ele Carpenter says the zeitgeist deserves at least some of the credit.
Paging Through Ireland
The Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept/Oct 2006
“I hear they’re bringing back the floozy in the jacuzzi,” my friend Rob said one day, out of the blue. We were sitting at the kitchen table in his rented house in Dublin, drinking tea.
Summering With the Loons in Cape May
Philadelphia Independent, Vol. 1 No. 17, August 2004
The Philadelphia Independent was a wonderful paper that was published for a few years in the early aughts. It was a hard-to-categorize publication that referred to itself as A General Interest Miscellaneous Newspaper, The Periodic Journal of Urban Particulars, and Too Big to Read on the Subway. I wrote a few pieces for them, and the one I'm proudest of is an essay about the birdwatching culture in Cape May, New Jersey.
I Live at Home
The Utne Reader, May/June 2002
I wrote this story to try to put into words what my life was like when I moved back home with my mother after my father died. It was published in a zine called Here, and a few months later the Utne Reader thrilled me by reprinting it. It has since been published in other publications, including a college textbook on creative writing.
How to Become the Media
Philadelphia Weekly, July 11, 2001
One of my first jobs out of college—certainly the first job I cared about—was on the editorial staff of the Philly Weekly. I was hired to edit the arts and entertainment listings, which I more or less neglected as I tried to get as much of my writing into the paper each week as I could. This essay was the first chance I got to write about something that mattered to me personally. I went to the Underground Publishing Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, where I attended workshops and lectures and met writers, artists, and librarians who were also activists, and who made their own media and took control of its distribution. The experience made a huge impression on me, and the things I learned that weekend serve me to this day.
Cat Burglars & Hustlers: The Graffiti Artist's Creed
Adbusters, Nov/Dec 2001
This is just a short piece I did for Adbusters magazine, but it marked the beginning of an interesting working relationship with a man who was a superstar graffiti writer in Philadelphia back in the 80s. I later wrote a long-form piece about him and graffiti's other early "kings" for Philadelphia Weekly.