Essays

My mother named me Lauren Brooke. She named my older brother Scott Justin. They are WASP-y names that evoke blonde American children playing in tennis whites, drinking lemonade under a suburban sun. She said she liked the way the names sounded, clean and lovely, names that would grow with us from childhood to adulthood. Our names, like many “American” names, came from somewhere else but were now tied to nothing. Both were vaguely Anglo; Lauren literally means “a crown of Laur

And even after the bones and the pots, the tall earth and its fields languishing, I'll hear the wind lashing, unleashing a plaintive ululating. You'll tell me it's angry, something with a hunger that cannot be filled, something that fills up the stones with grief and bruises, all the broken promises and bad marriages. What is a storm but the final, angry nightmare, you'll say. I can see it now - the way the room narrows at your view, eyes like slate in a closed office, the st

We all have chance interactions with strangers. Some of them - even fleeting encounters - stay with us forever.