Nonfiction

Cowboys

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…

Zoeglossia Introduction

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…

The Worst Possible Offense

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…

A PORTRAIT OF UNCLE BALFOUR

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…

Stardust

“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…

Koestler and Me

In 1946, setting out to write the memoirs of his most remarkable life, Arthur Koestler walked into the Times publishing offices in Printing House Square London. In a small cubicle overlooking the Thames, while, as he said, a tugboat wailed longingly for the sea, Koestler examined the newspapers of the day, month, and year of…

Among Men

Years ago, in the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like, what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the…