'Tis the season for watching movies, and over the Thanksgiving break I caught the French independent film "Full Time" by writer/director Eric Gravel starring Laure Calamy, which is available to stream on Prime. I don't think I've ever seen a film that manages to be both a thriller, complete with fast-paced, heart-racing scenes, and a simple yet effective story about a single mom trying to make it work, but this film adeptly does both. The main character, Julie, lives on the outskirts of Paris where it's cheaper and more family-friendly and has to commute into the city to work at her job as head maid at a 5-star hotel, where she supervises and trains other maids, inspects bedsheets to make sure they're perfect, and even cleans shit off bathroom walls with a power washer. She has a master's degree in business but was laid off four years ago and took lower-level work to make ends meet. Her job is high pressure (hmmm, I didn't intend that pun, but I think it somehow works) and demanding, yet even as she's interviewing for another job that's ain her field, the Paris metro workers strike and she can't get to work. When the trains stop running, she resorts to creative, dire measures, from bumming a ride with a neighbor she barely knows to hitchhiking to renting a cargo van for a few days, all while trying to keep her kids safe with an increasingly frazzled older neighbor who babysits them. There are so many small, great moments in this film that showcase the main character's resilience and creativity in the face of an almost impossibly crushing situation. Calamy's acting as she flirts with men to try to score rides, does whatever she can for her kids, and somehow holds it all together with a smile, is powerful. Her husband is away and hasn't paid alimony, which makes her situation dire, with the bank calling her to warn her that her mortgage is late and she needs to meet with them. Meanwhile, unable to get to work on time, slipping out to interview for another, better position, her job as head maid is also on the line. The tense soundtrack and sounds of ambulances and other city noises throughout the film add to the sense of emergency, both in terms of the work-life balance that Parisians have being threatened by capitalism run amok as well as the fraught situation of a single mom having to balance a tough job and the brunt of raising her children. A powerful, effective film. 

Sometimes you come across an essay that's so original in its writing and construction it puts you on the floor, and that's how I felt when I read "We Were Hungry" by Chris Dennis (originally published in Astra Magazine). The piece is about growing up poor, what the author on Twitter calls "rural consciousness," and addiction and recovery. The central conceit of the piece is the narrator writing a letter to McDonald's, which is the place he went when he was hungry, strung out and looking for love or simply a bathroom to do drugs in. 

The narrator introduces the essay by asking "What is a third place when a person has no first or second place?" (referring to "a place that is not home and not work but still wants us to stay awhile, to feel, even, a sense of belonging," according to his friend who has to define it for him). This question, of trying to find belonging when you've grown up with adverse childhood experiences in an unsafe place, haunts the essay. The hunger that drives the narrator and his sister is both a physical and a spiritual one, and ironically, when they have nowhere to go, McDonald's takes them in. "Is this what love looks like?" he asks in a kind of mock-awe. "Neither of us was able to recognize it." Even as the writer finds a semblance of safety in McDonald's, with sympathetic workers giving him and his sister free food, Mickey D's is a stand-in for love and their hunger is never satisfied, because after all fast food always leaves you wanting more, is designed to hook you, in fact. "When we were young, you dressed yourself up like a clown," he writes. "We longed to crawl inside of that clown, into a place where we could eat and be eaten forever ... A craving only leads to another craving."

In the midst of this semi-serious ode to the Golden Arches, the author suggests that he and his sister will never get well as long as they're caught up in cycle of poverty and part of a broken family. The narrator's relationship with his sister is one of the sweetest, most wrenching aspects of the piece. They act as each other's family, as protectors, when their own parents can't be there for them. "My sister and I stood in the way of so many things that might have damaged the other: car rides with strange men at 3 a.m., drugs from people too eager to sell them, loneliness," he writes. "My sister stood between me and danger." He describes their relationship as "like a dream of childhood. Drugs were a way of pretending we had no body at all, or that we were just a body and nothing else, or that our bodies were a third place where anyone could come and go without paying." And perhaps my favorite line of all: "What is a sibling but proof that you weren't alone through the worst of it? A witness. A fire wall against the gaslight of childhood. 'I was there, too,' she says." 

I think that's so true of siblings and the people that we grow up with -- they remind us of the hard times, the stuff we want to forget but need to remember to heal. Siblings ground us, take us back to who we were and always will be. And like the narrator says, they protect us, too. At the close of this essay, the narrator, his sister and McDonald's make up a kind of beautiful, dysfunctional family. Sadly, while the writer is in recovery from addiction (his bio lists him now as a social worker who helps people in addiction recovery), he describes his sister as still "in a crater on the moon of chaos." What an image. Great essay.   

For the past couple years, I've been involved in a community journalism program at The Land, and for the past six months or so, I've been teaching it and helping manage it. Why are we doing this? The main reason is to try to increase the community's capacity to tell their own stories. For years, Cleveland has been defined by the stories that professional journalists tell about us, whether good or bad, indifferent or kind, skillfully reported or parachute journalism. There are many great journalists and news outfits in town. But there's no denying there's fewer of them. And there's no denying Cleveland could use a boost in civic engagement. 

Enter The Land's community journalism program. Through training and paying residents to write about their own neighborhoods, and issues and communities across the city, we're trying to build the civic muscle for telling our own stories. It's been a hard process, but it's been rewarding. So far, we've graduated more than 75 people from our community journalism program, most of whom have gone on to write and publish stories with The Land. The program is free and we pay all community journalists $300 for their first story, then we invite them to join our network of community journalism grads and continue to write for us and get paid (rates start at $200). We also host events, Zoom sessions, networking nights and the like to keep connected. None of this would be possible without the dedicated mentors and staff who help power the program. 

Last week, I tagged along with a community journalist from Old Brooklyn, Anna Maria Hamm, to cover an event at East Clark School in South Collinwood being held by Cleveland Public Library, which is revamping 20 of the city's little free libraries. The power of the community journalism program was evident. Anna confidently interviewed folks at the event (once we figured out how the recorder on her phone worked, of course!) and she got great material. Thanks to her own smarts and dedication, as well as the 6-week training program and mentoring, she wrote a powerful story about this community project. Here's the result: Little free libraries: Where community comes together to increase childhood literacy – The Land (thelandcle.org). 

My role with The Land, which I helped start three years ago, has changed in the past year, as I've chosen to focus exclusively on editing, teaching, and writing. (I also continue to teach with Literary Cleveland, and will next year, too.) I believe in what we're doing and think we're starting to make a difference. Find out more about our community journalism program here, and consider joining the next cohort (or inviting someone you know to apply): ​Community Journalism Program – The Land (thelandcle.org). Also, it's fundraising season, so we urge you to also become a member: Support The Land (thelandcle.org). 

Early this year, I posted that Katherine and I had bought the house next door from an investor, who had in turn bought it from the previous owner. Our goal was to do a historic rehab and fix it up. Well, 9 months after buying it, and about six months after construction started, we largely finished the interior. It's up on Airbnb right now, and I thought I'd post some photos here. From cleaning out the house to tuckpointing the basement walls to helping design a new kitchen to picking paint colors, what a wild ride it has been. It turned out beautiful and we're excited about it. If you know anyone coming to town, please share this Airbnb link with them: The Queen Anne at Gordon Square. ​https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/998349242597093217?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=e8842474-792c-425e-8e5b-e87421c672bb Also, if you or anyone you know is looking for a realtor to buy or sell, have them contact me. Gotta get that plug in! 

Exciting news! I was recently awarded an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Ohio Arts Council, along with dozens of other artists from across Northeast Ohio and around the state. For the project I submitted, dubbed the "Fairfax Neighborhood History Project," I'll interview Fairfax residents and past residents and help document the collective history of that community. (I am from Cleveland Heights, not Fairfax, but have long been interested in the historically Black neighborhood as a Clevelander and also because my grandfather grew up there before his family moved to Cleveland Heights in 1918.) Thank you to the Ohio Arts Council for this amazing opportunity! I'll post more updates here as soon as the project gets started. Click here to check out the full press release: Ohio Arts Council Announces Approval of 182 Grants Totaling $587,902 | Ohio Arts Council

This fall, I taught a class called “Writing About Nature” at the Stone Cottage at Hines Hill Conference Center in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, held in partnership with the Conservancy for CVNP. In the class, we talked about the virtues of noticing our environment and using keen observation to ground your writing in place and sensory details. We lauded noticing – using one’s five senses to make one’s writing vivid and real for readers – as a writing practice, yes. However, we also talked about the power of noticing to calm our souls and selves during times when our attention is stretched, our lives are filled with distractions, and we are separated from nature.

The class shared a lot of laughs around the shared table in beautiful Stone Cottage, some short walks in the woods, and discussions of nature writing. One of the pieces we read was an essay called “Cliffrose and Bayonets” by Edward Abbey from his memoir Desert Solitaire. Abbey worked as a park ranger in Arches National Park in Utah in the 50s and 60s, and in the interconnected essays in Desert Solitaire, he writes about living alone in the wilderness and exploring the natural and human history of the area. He also rails against the federal government for building roads into the park to make it easier for people to explore – and destroy – Arches. Ultimately, the book is a powerful argument for wilderness, for the need to maintain and retain it as something that is separate from humans, and for the virtues of noticing.

Abbey, always a provocateur, begins the essay with the words “May Day,” indicating not only that it’s May 1st, the start of spring, but also that there’s something revolutionary, something pro-worker and anti-capitalist, about taking a walk in the desert. He refers to this desert as a “garden” that is “uninhabited” and sets off to explore it. The first thing he does is take “inventory,” which is exactly what we talked about doing in the nature writing class, that by taking inventory of our surroundings in nature, by stopping to notice what we might otherwise pass by in ignorance, we not only learn something new and gain insight into our environments, but we also might gain insight into ourselves. And that, in turn becomes powerful material for our writing.

Abbey catalogues that plants and flowers of the desert, showing us in equal parts their biological features – how they survive and have adapted in this harsh environment – as well as their natural beauty. Along the way, again, his essay is a provocative argument for the separateness of nature, not that it’s separate from us, but that it should be given its own place free of human intervention. “I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous,” he writes. “(Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)”

There are some amazing descriptions here – the honeybee “wallowing drunkenly” in the pollen of the cactus flower and refusing to leave “until the flower wilts, until closing time,” the “bayonetlike leaves” of the yucca, the juniper tree “glittering shaggily in the sunrise.” He goes on to explore the flowers, return to his trailer for breakfast, then head out to describe Arches National Park itself. Yet a few pages in we get one of my favorite paragraphs in Abbey’s memoir, one that exemplifies his theory not only of nature but a kind of moral philosophy for life. In his writing, he calls on us not only to stop being narcissistic and to notice the nature around us, but also to free ourselves from capitalistic, acquisitive behavior, from our obsession with possession. Instead, he suggests that we should live as part of natural systems, we should question capitalism and herd thinking to reconnect ourselves to our surroundings and develop our own ideas and thinking. 

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Cleveland Inkubator, the annual free writers' conference I helped start back in 2015, kicked off earlier this week and continues this weekend with a free conference at Cleveland Public Library downtown. Don't miss it! There are still workshops available, plus a keynote with author Elizabeth Acevedo on Friday night. And it's all FREAKIN' FREE. :) 

Inkubator now claims to be the "largest free writing conference in the country." Which is awesome. And totally unverifiable. Because, really, where does one measure such things? The Guinness Book of World Records? And who cares, anyway? But what a great tag line ... 

If you want to get your nature on, I'm teaching a fall workshop on "Writing About Nature." It's being held in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, so participants will not only have a chance to write about nature but also do nature-y things like go on hikes and stuff. So, in summary: nature, writing, nature, nature, nature. This event is being organized with the Conservancy for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. 

Finally, recently I had the chance to be a featured writer at Story Club Cleveland. Thanks, Dana Norris and others, for organizing this really sweet event, and then for trying to trap me and Amy Eddings in a dungeon-like elevator from the 19th century (we escaped). My story was about ... well, it's called "Bugs From Hell," and you'll just have to give it a listen to find out. My skillz kinda suck, y'all, so the sound is just phone quality and there's a little bit before and a little bit after, but you can still listen to it if you want. (How's that for selling it?) 

More soon. Promise. Gotta run to Lowe's, then pick up kids. 

Earlier this month, the good folks at Bending Genres emailed and said they'd like to publish my flash fiction story "My Exploding Uterus" in their latest issue. I was immediately excited. This is one of the first pieces from my new, in-progress flash collection to get published in a lit mag, and this is a great journal to appear in. Bending Genres is an online literary magazine that touts itself as publishing "thrilling, fanciful, oddball, unusual, stunning fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction pieces."

A few notes on the flash fiction story: I came up with the idea after a funny, late-night conversation with my wife. I wanted to write something that explored the fractured, crazy politics around reproductive rights in the world we live in, and I wanted to write it from the perspective of a funny, sassy, smart teenage girl. It was really the voice in the piece - innocent and knowing, sensitive and darkly ironic - that kept me engaged in writing it. I finished it quickly, submitted it, and now it's been published (this rarely happens so quickly). 

​You can check out my flash fiction story here: My Exploding Uterus. View the entire issue 33 here at www.bendinggenres.com. Bending Genres also offers writing groups and workshops. Learn more at https://bendinggenres.com/writing-groups/. 

I’ve been teaching essays from The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, and one of my favorites is “Drinking Story” by Elissa Washuta (originally published as “How Do I Tell My Story of Getting Sober?” in Harper’s), a tightly written piece that tells a story but also has elements of poetry in it (ha – maybe I’m just lazy and like to read shorter stuff). My class discussed how Washuta does what Mary Karr calls “expurgating the false self” in The Art of Memoir. This is when an author holds themselves up to the light, finds what’s wanting or false, and tosses out the superficial self for a truer one. When we tell stories, Karr says, we naturally tend to not only put ourselves in the best light, but also to believe our own obfuscations, to hide behind them to fool ourselves and others. The best writers, Karry says, poke holes in them.

From the start of this piece about recovery from alcohol addiction, Washuta’s voice is seeking truth. “They say the insomnia will end when the withdrawals end, but that’s just a lie they tell you so you won’t pick up, something to hold on to if ‘Don’t quit before the miracle happens’ doesn’t persuade you to hold on for one more day,” she writes. “Early on, I tried late-night meetings at the strip mall clubhouse with low lights and syrup-smelling vape clouds hanging near the ceiling like weather, but all those men and their court orders made me want to drink worse. My home was no place for a soul’s convalescence – the Crow Royal bottle was still in its velvet bag, sleeping while I couldn’t.”

The opening introduces the conflicts – she can’t sleep, she’s recovering, she doesn’t like the male-dominated AA meetings or being home by herself. As she tries to stay sober, her mind keeps casting backwards to bars she used to hang out in. Without alcohol to numb her mind and memory, she finds she’s painfully awake and aware all the time, averaging just five and half hours of sleep a night. “Once you get sober,” she writes, “you become fully aware in every waking moment, and without the generous erasure of the blackout, you meet a million details demanding to be sorted.”

This “backlog … nags that I’ve missed something.” Here’s where the expurgation of her false self comes in. “Maybe I drank because I wanted to sleep – this is one of those things I tell myself when I’m trying to make a story out of it,” she writes, bravely examining false stories she’s telling herself. “In truth, I remember why I drank. It never stays out of my head long. I remember the first red Solo cup and the self-breaking power of Everclear and Kool-Aid washing through me, back when my liver was still new enough to meet the liquor like a date with a man you don’t yet know you’ll fear.”

The last line gives us a hint of what’s going to be revealed. We’re driven to keep reading to hear Washuta’s painful, powerful truth – to watch her root out what’s really bothering her. In the AA meetings full of men, she tells the kind of neat, easy story they expect to hear. Yet her urge to drink is no simple narrative. It has a thousand plot points and stops and starts. It is in fact a powerful kind of denial of the narrative urge to move forward, to reckon with the conflict at the center of her life. “My years there are one long night inside of me … I have some anecdotes, some illustrations with plots, but no meaning,” she writes. “Strung together, they show the chaos I was cataloguing long before I was ready to tell its story.”

Washuta says AA saved her but acknowledges its limitations: an emphasis on a God she doesn’t believe in, its formulaic narrative about addiction. AA “saved my life by offering me a narrative form to hold my shapeless despair," she writes, but "once I let the plot sprawl, I couldn’t bring it back there.” The real reason for the sickness that led to her drinking, she reveals to us, is “knowing that men want to hurt me.” She recounts incidents of sexual violence she repressed through drinking because “alcohol was the only tool I had to shutter the memory palace in my head, where all the hallways led to rooms where I was on my back, pressed against a bed or a couch or a floor, suffering.” It’s storytelling, the complicated kind, the kind in which she throws out her false self, that allows her to live again.