One of my fave Van Zandt songs. A personal essay of mine came out in a Van Zandt anthology this past spring. The anthology contains gritty stories, poems, and essays reflecting the spirit of Townes Van Zandt. Copies are available through Amazon for $10---https://a.co/d/4gCNQVm

#AmListening #TownesVanZandt #AmericanFolk #FolkMusic #Anthology #PersonalEssay
https://youtu.be/jmBiNrOeMlQ

"It was both a failure and a discovery: Without my sheet music or memory, I could lurch forward anyway, relying on the technique I had spent most of my life internalizing."

At @longreads, Samuel Ernest's beautiful new essay considers faith, music, and musicianship in his coming out story.

https://longreads.com/2023/05/02/cocooning-samuel-ernest/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=social

#Longreads #PersonalEssay #ComingOut #Pride #PerfumeGenius #Music #Faith

Proud of my essay, which was boosted. Thanks, @medium --https://medium.com/crows-feet/i-didnt-age-slowly-it-happened-all-at-once-but-i-m-reclaiming-my-health-e1e81c66da5a

#writer #health #personalessay #memoir

Trouble concentrating? Same here, over the years. But I'm getting better. I wrote everything I know about concentration in this essay here. I write because it helps me remember what I've learned. There's also that hope that maybe, just maybe, someone else will gain from it. https://rudiseitz.com/2023/04/30/how-to-concentrate-on-a-task-you-hate/

#concentration #meditation #adhd #focus #mindfulness #gratitude #essay #personalessay

Join Heather Lanier on her journey through the Heart Wing of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia: "You can enter the giant heart. You can let proportion shrink you to the size of a blood molecule and traverse the four chambers, through tricuspid, pulmonary, mitral, and aortic valves."

https://longreads.com/2023/01/10/the-heart-wing/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#Longreads #Philadelphia #TheHeart #Science #Education #PersonalEssay

Christy Tending shows us how to ask for what we need: "There are things that able me. A chair. One person speaking to me at a time. Shoes that are not cute, but spare me nerve pain. A hot bath with epsom salts: so hot it would scald most, but my skin is like Kevlar. It craves the heat and wishes for it to dig deeper. These are simple but necessary things that make my life more livable."

https://longreads.com/2023/02/02/things-that-able-me-christy-tending/

#Longreads #PersonalEssay #Protest

this was medium-easy to write, hard to press "publish" on.

"The poorer you get, the more of a mark you become.

I had never been swindled when it came to tech maintenance. Something in the way I carried myself made it look like a possibility."

https://barbaragenova.substack.com/p/900

#personalessay

Mylène Dressler felt exhilarated learning to surf: "I floated for a moment. And then it happened. The lessons I had taken before all at once came back to me. Within a few minutes, I was surfing 'inside,' standing up briefly and falling joyfully."

#Longreads #PersonalEssay #Surfing #Joy #Renewal

https://longreads.com/2023/04/11/the-buddy-system/

Devin Kelly on frailty and resilience: "I am wearing the suit I will get married in and standing next to the person I will marry, and, halfway into service, I kneel down as part of the ceremony, feel something go wonky in my head and my mouth and my body, think nope nope nope, and collapse sideways into the arms of my fiance."

https://longreads.com/2023/01/26/something-about-the-present-devin-kelly/

#Longreads #PersonalEssay

"I was there. I saw it happen. The moment Charlie went from beginner to better. From 'kook' to 'intermediate' surfer. I watched him catch a nice overhead wave and ride it perfectly."

https://longreads.com/2023/04/11/the-buddy-system/

#Surfing #PersonalEssay #Longreads

It's been over a year since my 24 hours in A&E - https://rachelhandley.substack.com/p/snapshot-my-24-hours-in-a-and-e

Content note for: vomiting, blood, hospitals, sickness, lack of agency.

#personalessay #writingcommunity #covid

Do you have any #regrets? If not, great. If so, we have a thing in common. Here's how I've come to think about handling mine: https://rudiseitz.com/2023/03/31/dont-regret-reroute/

#essay #personalessay #personaldevelopment #regret #acceptance #insight #mindfulness #mentalimage #life

I have published "Building Personal Essays from Holons" on Medium. Let me know what you think of the prompts I share to help you do this.

https://medium.com/@sheilabender/building-a-personal-essay-from-holons-11fc83403ffc

#creative writing #personalessay #memoir

Autostraddle: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better) https://www.autostraddle.com/the-soft-butch-that-couldnt-or-i-got-covid-19-in-march-and-never-got-better/ #Dykes #LGBT #LGBTQ #Trans #Lesbian #2SLGBTQ #Podcast #personalessay #greatesthits #FirstPerson #disability #covid-19

A family memoir I started writing as a book has become a series of @medium stories. In this chapter, I tell the story of my grandpa running out on his family with another woman (my grandma) and his brush with fame when the makers of "The Blob" rented out his diner as a setting for the movie. This is an admittedly long read, but I hope, entertaining...

https://link.medium.com/z2omoKjx4xb

#memoir #personalessay #adultery #Hollywood

How my genealogy DNA test led to my mom's unknown sister.

So Many Secrets

https://link.medium.com/NKlvGuPdRxb

#genealogy #familytree #memoir #personalessay #DNA

Ice cream or broccoli rabe?

An essay on this question: https://rudiseitz.com/2023/02/21/the-peril-of-pairwise-comparison/

#icecream #broccoli #broccolirabe #comparison #personalgrowth #essay #personalessay

I don't know what to call it--creative criticism, weird scholarship, hybrid, intimate?--or, often, where to publish it, but the space between #scholarship and the #personalessay calls to me. Thanks to #Modernism / modernity for publishing this manifesto-ish thing. #humanities #academia https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/wheeler-creative-scholarship-or-doubling-down

join me for an exploration of being haunted by your own (digital)self-archive. a musing on self-identity with bonus pics of a very young, beardless me.

responses have included:
- 'this is a phenomenal piece'
- 'man that was so good'
- 'i am crying in my car'
- '🔥🔥🔥'
- 'DAMN you're hitting me hard'

https://exitpress.substack.com/p/ghost-in-the-machine

#art #identity #writing #nonfiction #diary #youtube #videos #personalessay

1 of 2
#nonfiction #memoir #personalEssay #cannabis #smoking #petDeath #sapphic #lgbtqi #bisexualChaos

One.

You’re in New York City for the first time. Your friend’s walk-up is cluttered and cozy, as homey as it should be, and it smells like weed. She smokes a lot. She eats even more. You haven’t done much before, but she offers a bowl to you, so you clumsily navigate lighter and pipe.

Truthfully, you’re scared to have a lighter that close to your face. But you’re in your twenties, your friend is in her thirties, she’s like your big sister. You want to look like you know what you’re doing. So you light it–flick–and your nose gets warm while you touch the flame to a corner of the herb. You inhale as it smolders. You get a little smoke. You think.

You go out on her balcony, which is small and made of wood so wobbly you’re not sure it can hold your weight, much less a charcoal barbecue. Neither of you know how to use a charcoal barbecue. You laugh a lot trying to get it to light in the wind. You keep a fire extinguisher on hand just in case.

You feel the warmth after another hit on the pipe. The vegetables you grilled with your best friend taste better. You laugh a little louder.

Two.

It’s cold outside, but you don’t want to smoke inside. You put on a balaclava. You wrap yourself in a bathrobe. You put on slipper socks. You huddle under a blanket on your balcony and light your bong, hands cupped around the pipe to shelter it from the wind. It still won’t light and your fingers are getting stiff. Grab the plasma lighter. It’s not as good, somehow, but it will make your herb burn even when the wind is blasting.

You take a couple deep hits that make you cough plumes into the chilly night, and the smoke is sucked away to disperse against the crystalline starlight. The harsh hits are bad for your lungs. You go inside, take a shot of Pepto to soothe your throat, puff on the inhaler to open your lungs. You settle into bed with a cold nose, cold fingers, and a dizziness that makes the room sway in the wind with you comfortable in its womb.

Three.

You’ve gotten good at baking with cannabis. People like your cookies–some of them say you can’t taste the weed on it, which isn’t true, because your husband cringes to nibble. But many people like the skunky taste. You like the skunky taste.

You’re careful with the cookies. You can’t have children getting into them, so you entomb them in a bag, carefully label it with contents and date, and stash it in the very back of the deep freezer. Since you’ve filled it with almond slivers, oats, and raisins, your kids won’t eat them even if they find them. But you want to be sure. You want to be responsible.

You’re so responsible that you don’t try the dough or the cookies. The butter must be infused, and the cookies baked, cooled, and stored, before your kids come home from school. You don’t want to be stoned when they get here.

Once they’re safe, you clean the skillet where you made cannabis ghee and prepare an omelet. It doesn’t taste like weed. Only when you’re sprawled on the couch in awe of the music melting through your muscles do you realize you didn’t clean the pan enough, and now you’re very, very stoned despite your naive efforts. On the bright side, while your cookies do taste like weed, your omelet did not.

Four.

It’s a cold, windy night on the Pacific coast. It’s so dark that the beach and the ocean are indistinguishable from each other. You’re in love with the woman at your side, sneaking onto the boardwalk amid the dunes. You haven’t told her about this big warm secret coiled in your belly. Your bodies hold warmth between them while you shelter the pipe. It’s the second pipe you bought on this vacation. The first one wasn’t properly drilled with holes, and it weighs down your pocket. It’s pressing against her thigh. She smells like coconut oil and she’s beaming at you when flickering lighter shines gold on her face.

You both inhale. You take all the smoke inside of you and breathe with each other, seated on the sandy steps. The ocean roars slower than your breath. There’s a dark shape on the shore. You can’t be sure if it’s a signpost or a man coming to bust you for getting stoned on the beach in the middle of the night. It’s scary. But being scared is funny.

Her skin is so soft, so smooth. You don’t know it yet but six months later, you won’t be talking. This moment that makes you giddy with the joy and desire will be only a memory. The shape on the beach is a signpost. Nobody cares you’re smoking in the dunes. You’ll still have the pipe without a hole drilled properly, and sometimes you’ll hold it in your hand and remember how her braids felt against your lips.