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1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family’s home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. “Tis a sickly time now in phila.,” the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; “there has been an unusual number of funerals lately…
“. . . home is where our stories are, and that’s not just a question of ethnicity or even country . . .” —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world’s attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and…
1. I couldn’t tell you what we saw in Tod O’Neil, or what we feared. Maybe it was a matter of timing: Tod had that lion-tamer’s knack for knowing just when to crack the whip, a blunt force of personality with which he kept his friends in line. Not that we were his “friends,” exactly—we…
Silence. Being silenced is a common experience for people with disabilities. Society is uncomfortable with our voices, which are regarded as unwieldy, awkward, too loud, too quiet, too scary, or strange. When we are allowed to speak, others want to control the narrative. They want to read a story or poem that explains the difficulties…
Paragraph means “to write beside.” I sit beside myself, writing. I sit beside my brother’s lungs, listening to the hissing oxygen tank he also sits beside, transcribing his story of breath: scraping, wet, sticky, low. I write beside his slow strangling, struggling to inhale even when he is sitting still. Even when he runs out…
A good barbershop tells you who owns it, and that’s so with Blue Spark in Baltimore. Bill’s place is plastered with stickers advertising tattoo parlors and breweries and garage bands and the city itself: BALT superimposed over a rat. Skulls are popular, as are likenesses of Edgar Allan Poe. Bill calls Poe the city’s first…
The fall of 1991, as my boyfriend and I drove from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to Virginia to West Virginia to Vermont and then all along the northern route through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California, the one consistent thing we witnessed from town to town and city to city…
My books, when I was a child, were populated with fairy godmothers, magic princes, wizards who would make your wishes come true with a wave of a wand or a few abracadabras. Inside these color-saturated pages, the characters took trips to far-off lands where spine-tingling adventures awaited. It was a fantasy beyond my own wildest…
“It was a dungeon,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late nineteenth century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the…
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