Category: Nonfiction

Weekly personal essays

Space: The Primal Frontier

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There’s no better setting for an existential crisis than IKEA. This one starts and ends with a TIDAFORS EDSKEN dark gray sofa.

That’s the opening line of my latest post at Oy!Chicago, Those Blue-and-Yellow Box Store Blues. I really like this post! It’s a good foil to a lot of the things I’ve been wrestling with lately, which have largely included how to use the spaces I inhabit. In the Oy! post, it’s about investing in an apartment; here, on Magpie & Whale, it’s about not building the idea of the site up so much in my head that I never say anything here unless it’s Deep and Meaningful and Well Crafted and Illuminating.

That’s… not very representative of what Being Alive and Being a Person entails. So, time for an arbitrary break with perfectionism. I’ve been super enjoying the blogs of my friends lately (Coming to the Edge and Terra Bear are always good reads!), so I hope to bring more of that to Magpie & Whale in the future, near and far.

(I also hope to bring more fiction here too. And maybe things like book reviews and such, because I finally want to create stories and enjoy books again, after a very long time not feeling either of those things. Given that we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of my mom’s death, I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about that in the coming weeks too, but for now, there’s been a palpable feeling lately of being able to come back into the world, and that’s nice. And she would want that too.)

By the way, you may have noticed that M&W has its very own domain now! I’m still pretty stoked about that. I’ve also added a snazzy (and expansive) Journalism section; this site was originally intended to be a launching pad for my identity as a professional writer of fiction (someday!), but until I commit to making RealName.com anything more than a place where I learned how to CSS and WordPress (yes, those are verbs; no, don’t look, it’s horrible to behold), this is going to be a much more interesting and informative place to be.

Okay! That’s been good. How’re you guys? Hi!

Midway through Medill

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Man in orange shirt shows off tattoo

Today was my last class of my second quarter of grad school, which means I’m pretty much halfway through my time as an apprentice journalist, as I’m thinking of it. At this very moment I’m just trying to catch up on my sleep debt, which is more profound than I realized. But for those who found interest in the work I’ve been doing this term, here are the back four stories that I filed, rounding out my 11 required.

  1. Military suicide epidemic compels survivor families to speak out (June 6, 2013)
    Of the military families the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors looks after, as many have lost a veteran family member to suicide as to combat. Andy and Julianne Weiss of Naperville are of that number: their son, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Danny Weiss, took his own life in March 2012. The Weiss family is determined to confront the issues of mental health and suicide risk among veterans, especially given that, according to government statistics, 22 veterans commit suicide every day.
  2. Warrior artists explore art therapy for veterans (June 5, 2013)
    Veterans and art therapists are working together to formulate new counseling programs using creative arts therapies outside of the VA system. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Albany Park Community Center have just completed the pilot year of their VetCAT program, using a variety of approaches to bring veterans healing.
  3. Veterans without VA health care eligible for Medicaid through Obamacare (June 5, 2013)
    Thousands of uninsured Illinois veterans could start receiving health coverage when the Affordable Care Act provisions expanding Medicaid eligibility kick in on Jan. 1, according to a study released in March. Many factors could be keeping these veterans from using VA health care benefits, including, in some instances, a choice to avoid the VA entirely.
  4. Healing through art for veterans at Portage Park museum (May 28, 2013)
    A new exhibit at the National Veterans Art Museum shares and explores the work of veterans who are artists, and why art has been valuable to them.

I have a letter to the Chicago veteran community that I would like to write, but the short version of it is that it has been such a privilege and such a pleasure reporting on such an extraordinary group of people, all of whom are doing such important and amazing work. I thank everyone I’ve spoken with for entrusting me with their stories.

The counterpart to the “Hello, world!” post: “I aten’t dead yet.”

Esther1 Comment

Well, that’s embarrassing — the first piece of spam on Magpie & Whale made it through Akismet, which I then had manually go in and delete, to my shame. It’s been, what, three months since I updated? Many apologies; there’s been a lot going on.

Medill is going well — it’s going very well, in fact. I continue to be wildly, wildly happy, with the program, with the people and with this profession. We’re coming up on the end of the quarter, and it looks like all my final projects are due on June 3, which is inconvenient, as that’s my mom’s would-have-been 70th birthday and I will be in Ohio that weekend. She, of course, would not let me get away with not doing the work, so it’s going to be a busy week.

I have a new side project that I keep banging my head against, trying to make it go from concept to outline to execution. It’s more “what if?” Shakespeare, though it’s more in line with the play (Henry IV Part 1, for the curious) than Innogen is with Cymbeline. (I also have not forgotten Innogen. It pains me that it’s still stalled. There is a break coming up, though, and hopefully that will be fruitful. Thank you everyone for your patience. If George R.R. Martin can [sort of] do it, so can I, goshdarnit.)

In the meantime, if you’re interested in the reporting I’ve been doing as part of the Medill News Service this quarter, here are links to my seven published stories so far; I have four more to go. I’ve been covering veterans and military families, and I’m spending this Memorial Day transcribing interviews conducted at the opening of the new exhibit at the National Veterans Art Museum, so I suppose that’s apropos. Continue reading “The counterpart to the “Hello, world!” post: “I aten’t dead yet.”” →

Half of the first year

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I’m waiting for the pirate to do her work.

Tori Amos came to Pittsburgh on November 6, 1998, on her “Plugged ’98” tour. I had been living and breathing her music for two years at that point. She had gotten me through the worst of middle school, she had been the reason I started reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and she was going to be only four hours away from my hometown in Athens, Ohio.

My mom let me skip a day of school and drove us to Pittsburgh, a city we both loved anyway, and we went to that concert together. I made a huge glittery sign that the guards made me throw away before we entered. I was 14, and most of the audience was older than me and younger than my mom. When Tori came onstage, I screamed and screamed and screamed. The show was incredible, even if my mom did get disgusted and bored by Tori’s ten-minute version of “The Waitress,” with its world-filling refrain “I believe in peace, bitch.” I bought merch (my mom paid for it). I was giddy for hours after. My mom and I had a great weekend together. As far as first concerts go, it set a high bar.

A post came up on Tumblr a few weeks ago, promising bootleg downloads for the whole tour. My heart stopped. I clicked the link, but it was dead. I wrote the owner of the blog, asking whether there was a new source for that particular date. I told her why it was important to me, but when she wrote back, she only said that she’d be out of the country for the next few weeks and that she’d get to it in March.

My mother and I are in that crowd somewhere. I’m waiting for the pirate to do her work.

Continue reading “Half of the first year” →

Things I did on my first day of grad school

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No one is surprised that I really take to approaching strangers, chatting for a few minutes and asking if I could take their picture. Our first assignment, in our first Methods class (where we learn both the skills necessary for today’s tech-wielding journalism and whether we have unexplored passions for new-to-us media creation), is to spend an hour in the Loop and come back when we’ve taken interesting photos of people. Along with two other girls, I head south and west, along Van Buren Street, across the river and down into Union Station. Nearly 70 shots later, I’ve talked with Ed, who works a newsstand behind the Chicago Board of Trade; the owner of a liquor store and bar that’s closing after 55 years in the same hands; Ellen, who insists she only takes good photos when she’s standing next to her brother-in-law; and a postman, pictured above, who says, “I’m just working, I’m just working.”

Turns out I’m super into this. Can’t wait until I get to do this and write about it too. Continue reading “Things I did on my first day of grad school” →

One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing

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One year ago today I took the GRE. I had only the vaguest idea of applying to graduate school, and was entertaining a few very different options, having recently gone to a nonprofits-focused grad school fair sponsored by Idealist.org. Public policy at the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in the arts? Editing and publishing in the book industry at Emerson College in Boston? A self-designed master’s program at my beloved alma mater, the University of Chicago?

Today I sent in my FAFSA and have been making calls about immunization records. This week I was accepted at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, something which makes me scream inside (and sometimes outside) every time I remember that it’s real. I’ll be starting in early January.

A few months ago I renewed my passport. My last was issued in June of 2001. I remember sitting there looking at the photo of that girl and feeling both distant from and protective of her. She has so much ahead of her — college and 9/11 and California and improv and fumbling through her twenties and writing novels and road trips and fights and career angst and losing her mother. Especially losing her mother. Then I started to wonder if I was being too precious and literary about this moment, but that path seemed like a waste of my time. Feel what you feel and screw feeling ashamed of it.

I can say without qualifiers that this has been the worst year of my life. My mother died of brain cancer on August 24. Nothing I can say can make sense of or communicate what that’s like, so I will just say that I love her and miss her and have been thinking of her so much this week.

Yet the phrase that kept popping up when I shared this news was I’m so proud of you. That’s exactly what she said to me my whole life, and what she would have said now. I can’t tell you what it means to me to hear it from all my friends and loved ones. She was a little less gone every time I saw those words.

This week I also left my job of three and a half years. I have a month of funemployment ahead of me, during which I intend to do every fun thing I’ve managed to not do yet in Chicago, as well as the more mundane things I’ve been neglecting (you do not want to know what my kitchen or my apartment in general look like right now). (Yes, some of this includes working on Innogen & the Hungry Half — many have been asking!) I’ll also have eight days in Seattle, which, between spending time with my nieces (and their young Great Dane) and marathoning British TV with Joe Armstrong in, is going to be beyond splendid. I need this month. I need a month that’s just good to me.

I’ve often felt like it’s hard for me to look back on a year and notice the arc or the personal changes. This year has been a stark one, bad and good.

Hug the ones you love and tell them so.

Statistically, the hard times cannot go on forever. And at last, they didn’t.

Happy December, friends. May the next year be new.

Laramie is my Ithaka

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Holiday travel as a metaphor for existence, or at least your twenties? It could be a thing. I just wrote “I Made It to Wyoming” for Oy!Chicago, which is part travelogue, part confession of poor planning habits and part announcement: next week will be my last at my present employer. After that comes another adventure.

My first flight, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, was scheduled to leave Midway around 1:30. I’m terrible about packing. I always tell people I have packer’s block, and can only do it the morning I leave. It only takes me half an hour at the outside, so I was prepared to enjoy a leisurely breakfast at my Lincoln Square apartment with a huge mug of my favorite tea. Until, of course, I remembered that I wasn’t giving myself nearly enough time to navigate a major airport on the busiest travel day of the year. I’m not saying the scene that followed was from Home Alone, but it’s not as far off the mark as I like to admit.

Continue reading “Laramie is my Ithaka” →

All My Hotspurs

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Kenneth Branagh is the only Benedick; anyone else is just mouthing the lines. That’s what comes of having seen his Much Ado About Nothing at a very formative age. Even with the story reconfigured, as in the BBC Shakespeare Retold series, while I adore Damian Lewis’s take, it still looks odd to me.

I’m having this issue with a history play at the moment. Over the summer, the BBC released The Hollow Crown, a tetralogy spanning Richard II, both the Henry IVs and Henry V. Despite the fact that Shakespeare’s history plays have never really been my thing (I tend more towards the weird stuff), I was always going to watch these productions: Tom Hiddleston plays Prince Hal/Henry V. Now, he does a magnificent job, as does everyone on the cast and crew, but for me, someone else stole the show. Thanks to Joe Armstrong, I’ve become a total Hotspur fangirl. Continue reading “All My Hotspurs” →

Those were our times: Patti Smith’s Just Kids

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I have two Patti Smith songs in my iTunes library: one is a live performance of “About a Boy” from the 1997 Tibetan Freedom Concert, and the other is a cover of “Don’t Smoke in Bed” from the eternally awesomely named Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She Thing. For most of my life, these and her status as “the Godmother of Punk” were all I knew about her. I never expected I would have feelings about her and her work, but as it turns out, that’s only because I hadn’t met her yet. Continue reading “Those were our times: Patti Smith’s Just Kids” →

This story the world may read in me: Esther’s many feelings about Cymbeline

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This past Memorial Day weekend I corrected a longstanding tragedy, which was that I had never seen Cymbeline performed. I’ve read it numerous times, but there’s a particular thrill in seeing a text you love interpreted in another medium—in this case, its right medium. The fabulous Alex agreed to trek down to Hyde Park during her visit to Chicago, and we showed up, full of dinner from a favorite college haunt, for an outdoor performance at the new (and stunning) Logan Center for the Arts. Continue reading “This story the world may read in me: Esther’s many feelings about Cymbeline” →