The Suffering of Art
There is a certain place on the left side of the neck that marks a person as a violinist, a pressure sore from holding the instrument against tender skin. It’s where the hard spruce of the violin ribs contacts flesh, a lumpy red chafe mark the size of a quarter that comes from the effort of keeping the instrument from falling to the ground.
Motherhood Requiem
One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen.
In Which The Author’s Father Harold Attempts Suicide in 1948 By Walking Across Flatbush Avenue Blind
…and I can feel the blindfold tight against my eyes, and it is one a.m. and I am crossing Flatbush Avenue not seeing, not thinking, soon not being…
Another Day
I’ve always done my work at the kitchen table, an oversized, blonde, oak pedestal table that was one of the first pieces of “grown-up” furniture my husband and I bought for our new house almost thirty years ago.
Flako Cup Cakes
I still remember the warm buttery taste of Flako Cup Cakes, which I made with my mother from a mix in a box. In 1963, even in Greenwich Village, cup cakes were two words. It was always Flako, never Jiffy or Duncan Hines, and I never knew why.
Three Songs of Two Cities
“The future isn’t waiting,” a Buffalo billboard says. Pictures of towering children outside the empty offices of Upstate Youth Empowerment Now aren’t waiting.
Before They Were Our Mothers
Voices of Women Born Before Rosie Started Riveting
Saratoga Springs: Journal Arts Press, 2018. Trade Paperback. Fine. Item #2207986
ISBN: 9780578199498
Yes, Even You Can Write A Book Review!
I think it was somewhere around the fifth or sixth layer of scribbled Post-it notes on top of each already note-strewn page in the composition book I’d bought especially for writing down every single impression I had while preparing to review Geeta Kothari’s short story collection, I Brake for Moose and Other Stories, that I started to doubt my ability to write even one coherent sentence about this book.
A Hunger Like Longing
That summer before my mother lost her mind for the first time, I started to learn a violin concerto.
Musical Stargazing with Nadia Ghent
In 1992, in my former life as a free-lance violinist in New York City, I was one of 86 performers invited to participate in the world premiere of Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis at Carnegie Hall.
Review of I Brake For Moose
I Brake for Moose, Geeta Kothari’s debut story collection, throws into sharp focus the conflicts between identity and culture in a globalized world. In these eleven subtly connected stories, Kothari explores the deep challenges to self, presented by an uncompromising American value system that seeks to erase difference and make invisible the humanity of those who are not the same.
Flat Mountain
So all of a sudden, my dad swung the car off the road onto a little parking area and told me with great excitement and glee that we had just arrived at the most wonderful and amazing place in the whole world, called Flat Mountain, a place thousands of people drive for hours and hours to get to but often can't find at all, and weren't we so amazingly lucky to find it right here right now!
Reflections on Flat Mountain
Nadia Ghent painted a stunningly vivid portrait of her father Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia’s life with her father that distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie recognized as essential to his nature.