Category Archives: NONFICTION

I read a rather aimless book last year about the experience of being a woman pedestrian and despite being pretty dry it was the first time I read a dedicated 300+ pages about the very act that haunts me: Walking. Or, more specifically, walking outside as a woman alone.

Once a year or so, or perhaps more frequent as it was in 2020, I ask myself the same question: Do I want to be a nun or do I just need some space? I don’t think I’ve earnestly considered nunhood before but I still pose this question to myself. No, it’s simply just space that I need.

At the end of 2019 I tasked myself to only read books by women-identifying writers for 2020. Towards the end of 2019 I was adding titles to my (some may say meticulous) reading list and realized my nonfiction folder was dominated by men. This fact that I listed so many men isn’t necessarily ridiculous, but it is curious considering that the last several nonfiction works by men that I read in 2019 felt like sludging through mud.

My list-making is genetic. My mom uses any rational surface as a notepad for her lists, including the margins of church bulletins, empty space on envelopes, or the backs of flyers for the neighborhood kid mowing lawns. She makes lists beyond just your generic to-do.

I learned the power of saying no at my very first job, an ice cream store just a few miles from my house in Kentucky. The store owner’s elderly mother, Marge, begrudgingly became the manager because her daughter