Day 90: The Atomic Weight of Guilt

As a child, you lay on your father’s belly while the New York Yankees run bases on a small black and white television in your old apartment. Your small frame, so thin your mother has to “take in” every pair of pants you own, rises and falls with his breath. Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.

Day 79: Birthdays

I get older; you get older. That’s how this works. My legs are healing. Bright pockmarks of red and white mark where the surgeon’s knife entered. An “X” to kill the tributaries. That’s what he told me. A balding, gentle man in his late seventies with his hands on my Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.

Day 42: Various Positions

For Leonard I’ve seen this room, and I’ve walked this floor. You know, I used to live alone before I knew you. The ceilings in my apartment in Wilkes-Barre are at least twenty feet high. I am not yet twenty-seven and am already divorced. When I come home drunk, I Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.

The Fat Girl’s Guide to (not) Getting Pregnant

Step One: Want it. For years, I imagined Emily following me around with a blanket in her arms like Linus from the Charlie Brown cartoons.  Her hair would fall into black ringlets that dripped to her shoulders like water.  She would never grow over two feet tall in my mind. Read more

The Universe Between Us

Alone, I am a star burning against the night sky. I am lost in a blanket of darkness, a heaving illuminated mass threatening to collapse in on itself. But together, Timmy and I are a galaxy, a vast wonderful world of possibilities. We are bright and organized, burning into one Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.

I F*cking Hate My Body

Excerpt from the memoir Fat, Girl, Skinny I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t. I buy dresses, hike them up above the knee, feel the swoosh of them on the back of my thighs, but cannot forget the purple inky veins slinking across my skin. Read more

Amye Archer

Amye Archer holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny, was named runner-up for the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award, and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has two poetry collections: BANGS and A Shotgun Life, both published by Big Table Publishing. Amye’s work has appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Hippocampus, Mothers Always Write, Nailed Magazine, PMS: Poem Memoir Story, PANK, and Provincetown Arts. She is the creator of The Fat Girl Blog.