In 2006, I was a public school Art teacher in NYC. This was a Monday: With large craft scissors aimed at six-year-old eye level, Emelia serpentined through the classroom, leaving the spared in her wake. She flew through tiny chairs and tiny tables, her weapon drawn, eliciting yelps and screams from some, frightened laughter from […]
Read more "Opportunity Doesn’t Knock"Reggie Vray was whistling the open bars to “Amarillo Lady” when he walked out on the deck. Some courtesy of the Valor’s staff had placed Reg’s cabin far from the Caitlin-Tucker honeymoon lovings, but Reg heard her calling him as he passed the main floor chapel. Caitlin Crow and Tucker Thompson were standing near the […]
Read more "The Valor Cruise Dud: Part Three"A lot of people have wondered over the last eight months, and especially the last few weeks, how teenagers in Steubenville, Ohio, could witness someone being raped and not do anything about it. But we know why. Of course we do. They watched as she was raped because we haven’t taught them otherwise. Not as […]
Read more "Clearing the Water on Rape"Renewal, rebirth, and regeneration are all words we throw around this time of year. For me though, this time of year brings a strange heavy and dragging feeling of unbridled anger, a dash of depression, and a thunderous wave of resentment over the last nineteen years. The last time I saw my father I was […]
Read more "The Other R-word"It’s officially spring and spring means green things. John Kallas’s Edible Wild Plants has been very helpful in identifying a few tasty greens available at this time in the Pacific NW. The one I eat most often is chickweed, because it’s the most plentiful. I’ve even got a rich patch of chickweed about a block […]
Read more "The Salad Days"My grandma would have been 88 on St. Patrick’s Day. She passed the summer before last, just before I moved to Portland. I’d said goodbye to her while she was still in the hospital, waiting to go home where my mom and hospice nurses her would tend to her for her final month. The last time […]
Read more "The Noble Saint"When I was in middle school, my hobby was writing terrible historical fiction. There was the time-traveling doomed romance on the Titanic, and the Oregon Trail epic with no plot. But the tale I thought was going to change the American literature landscape was my revolutionary war novel, Eliza Jane. Eliza became a spy for […]
Read more "Eliza in Spring"The season is changing, our writers are musing on spring awakenings, and we think it’s time to tidy up the website too. We’ve revamped our Submissions page with a list of women-friendly journals to submit to. If any of our readers have other journals they want us to add to the submission list, we happily welcome […]
Read more "Spring Cleaning"It was not in 2073, but in 2008 that she realized some of her missteps may have related to men. Her head was already in a lot of pain as she thought this. At this particular moment, questioning the twenty-five years she’d been alive seemed like too much. What she had to concentrate on was […]
Read more "2073"A big thank you to Mary for the invitation to write for PDXX. I’m happy to be here. The mommy voice is a scary one. Because it is so universal and so personal at the same time, nothing any mom says can speak for the collective, but everyone can relate to everything one mom says. […]
Read more "While the Adults Spin Around"
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