I spent years of my life thinking I would be a member of a room like that by dying. That I would be the thing no one was talking about, all anyone was thinking. I spent years imagining what those rooms might be like with me not there.
At a time when American women can ascribe to feminism with comparatively little fanfare, insisting on one’s own humanity as a woman is still an act of monstrosity—one with which ugliness and craziness, the two things that women are supposed to fear most, is always elided.
It is good if the public library appeals to seniors, but it is not good if seniors are the only people to whom a library appeals. New generations need to use their library, need to need their library, if the library is to remain inside the tightening circle of things the government will do for its people.
It’s the starting, and the prospect of starting, and the thinking about how I will have to think about starting, that makes me want to vomit and die on the floor for a long time.
On one afternoon, I saw four consecutive patients with no history of hypertension who all posted blood pressure recordings above standard values. Each blamed our recent banter about Donald Trump.
Pancake was a canary somewhere deep in the American coal mine, warning us of the methane building up, and of the explosion that would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, the canary is always the first to die.
We’d walk into a McDonald’s and smell the familiar fried food and order the same burger and French fries and I'd taste the idea of home on my tongue. I would awake to the realization that this taste could be home.
Season of Migration to the North is a 169-page umbilical cord connecting me not just to my Sudanese side but, in a more direct manner, to my 74-year-old father who has managed to survive—and thrive—suspended between two worlds. It’s his suspension, this thrilling existential high-wire act, which inspires my own.
I’m a man performing a role that gets coded as feminine, and I might be assuaging my insecurities about occupying such a marginalized position by spinning elaborate fantasies of masculine intellect and profundity.
The witch stood up and let out a piercing whistle while fervently shaking a gourd rattle, which I first mistook for a maraca. As she spoke, her voice changed, become low and growling and beautifully theatrical.
Sissy Hankshaw is built up, then taken down. She is normalized, de-sexualized, tamed. Sissy starts out a revolutionary and ends up a fantasy—tamed by Tom Robbins.
It’s Patchen’s ambition to make us all look like animals, and disarming the semblance of any known structure of narrative is an essential part of this dizzying quest.
