Memoir
“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am »
Memoir
“Jimmy Carter was a paradox, my favorite kind of person. He was a human being being human, and owning it.” One drizzly Tuesday night in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and »
Memoir
“And some of us so country and so baaaad / like the daddy on Good Times when he gets up to / find a Western on TV and he pretends to be / John Wayne while he doing it” I saw Sissy in Urban CowboyA woman riding on a mechanical bullcould make men wake up »
Memoir
At the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Stephen Garofano was a twenty-eight-year-old professional musician living in New Orleans. He says, “In the aftermath of the storm, my diary began to feel like an important document of the historical tragedy unfolding around me, as well as a tether to reality and a lifeline to myself.” An opera »
Memoir
“Those songs that continue to play long after the last note has faded. Grandma. It was sonic southernness. It is everything I know.” Grandma. Care was her method. Always. But she needed a break, and Mom knew it too. Attentive eyes. Mom took after her mother. It was settled. Grandma was coming home. Norfolk, Virginia. »
Music
I was seven in 1995 when I first heard “Space Age Pimpin’.” The bassline and raw rhymes of 8Ball & MJG had me and you, yo mama and yo cousin too all wanting to seduce a beautiful woman like Adina Howard, and drive her around on gold Daytons through my hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee. Day in and »
Memoir
I come from a long line of people whose lives seemed straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Landless whites, rootless, disposable—“white trash.” It’s hard to create home from contingency, or a feeling of belonging from worthlessness. They say southerners are people defined by place, but I never believed it. At least it wasn’t true »
Memoir
During my first Thanksgiving away from home since I had moved to San Diego for graduate school, my mother, Lita, called me after she and my stepdad, Mike, returned home from the family Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was hosted by Annie and Steve, my pseudoparents, and it turned out that year, 2019, was one of »
Memoir
One evening in March 2024, I attended a cabaret fundraiser presented by the Common Woman Chorus, a Durham, North Carolina LBGTQ+ choir, and hosted by local drag queen Stormie Daie. Dressed in fancy sequined gowns or T-shirts and jeans, members of the choir sang everything from the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” to Saturday Night Live’s “Tampon Farm,” »
Memoir
“For me, Miguel, you were always a part of the‘we’that I think of when I think of home.” THIS IS THE LAND that brought us together. I have been driving for seven hours. I am tired. I stop my car in the shoulder on the Highway 82 Mississippi River Bridge to watch the sun set »
Memoir
I direct an outdoor program at a small college in Southwest Virginia, and if you work at a small, private college, a significant part of your job is recruiting, selling the value of the institution to prospective students. For a college in Southwest Virginia, it’s also been about selling the value of place. I tell »
Memoir
I have lived on a small farm in southern Vermont for the last thirteen years. One year, it simply did not snow, and the low-grade environmental anxiety I’d been swallowing blossomed into something ferocious, blocking my imaginative impulse. I felt as though I couldn’t write fiction anymore. I poured my energy into becoming an environmental »