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Every fall, there’s a shift. New notebooks, sharpened pencils, packed lunches. Even if you’re not the one going back to school, the rhythm of the season is everywhere. For some, it’s kids starting a new grade. For others, it’s stepping into classrooms again as an adult. Either way, the season carries a certain weight full of hope, nerves, sometimes exhaustion, and sometimes all three at once. Looking Back, Looking Forward I am of course one of the more seasoned of my classmat

In 2025, I hit a milestone that I almost didn’t believe myself: Thirty years sober. I got clean at twenty, and have never had a legal drink. That is something people tend to respond to with either admiration or confusion, like I missed some rite of passage that makes adulthood official.I didn’t. My life needed a different path. In those early years, staying sober meant holding on with both hands while also taking on plenty of odd jobs while I was at it. I learned to pick up

During my first years of sobriety I had too many jobs, struggling to keep any of them. I washed dishes, sold running shoes, and was a personal assistant to a rich housewife. I sold clothes and knives, and then, was a framer at an ultra high end framing store. Early on I was so broke I remember counting out dimes and nickels to pay for food. My fellow running shoe store workers, equally broke, advised me on the cheapest spots. At the time, I lived in an efficiency with a broke

Working in my writing studio, revising essays and tracking submissions. One rejection (and acceptance!) at a time. For months, my inbox was a wall of polite no’s. The kind of rejection that’s just part of the deal. Submit... Wait... Get a form letter... Keep going. That’s what I expected when I started submitting last fall. Shortly after beginning my MFA in Creative Nonfiction. My professors and classmates pushed me to start submitting. Not because they thought I’d get publis

100 rejections. 0 acceptances. What happens when you chase “no” instead of waiting for “yes”? Turns out... everything changes.