Even though North Country School had to shut down a little early because of that thing that begins with “c” and ends with “d”, the sixth graders and I were able to read One for…
Lit Mag Love: Nikki Schulak
My Lit Mag Love posts are all about finding treasures when I immerse myself in the hundreds of literary magazines online. I submitted a piece to Porcupine Literary, a magazine for and by teachers, but…
Published: Oh Reader
Grief and growth take center stage in The Third Mushroom, a middle-grade novel by the talented Jennifer L. Holm that serves as a follow-up to The Fourteenth Goldfish, a book I shared with my first…
Published: Grief Isn’t Always Center Stage
Long ago I worked as the first communications director for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. I love coffee and I loved living in Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, but I didn’t love the job. I spent hours writing…
Published: Ticket to Ride
When Shutterfly landed in my inbox in December 2020, I felt assaulted by their cheery message to “push rewind” and relive memories from a family trip nearly a decade ago. So many of us are…
Published: Creating a Grief & Growth Notebook
The process I learned to help clients who’d experienced sexual assault reframe their trauma became an important feature of my own healing 17 years later when I lost my teenaged son to suicide. I call…
Published: Omissions
I started writing Omissions after a real-life examination of my faculty bio on my school’s website midyear into a new teaching position. My sixth-grade students were to profile a faculty member of their choice, but…
Lit Mag Love: The Highchair on FB
My Lit Mag Love posts are all about finding treasures when I immerse myself in the hundreds of literary magazines online. I submitted a piece to Lunch Ticket magazine on a Tuesday and they rejected…
Lit Mag Love: Amelia Bedelia Takes a COVID Test
My Lit Mag Love posts are all about finding treasures when I immerse myself in the hundreds of literary magazines online. I did a search for magazines that accept previously published material and came across…
Where Reasons End
I’d started this novel by award-winning Yiyun Li at least five times since it was published in 2019. I finally sat down with it, reading once through and then again to take notes, in early…