Category: Friends + Family

First Four Seasons

Judith Staff

First Summer We have been in Canada about a month, and the constant feeling of shock somewhere deep in my tummy, is not abatting. I am just eight years old. I am lonely, bored, and my parents have a lot to do, so my mother takes me out to the Read more

Judith Staff

Judith Staff’s background is in teaching and early years education. She still teaches occasionally, though now her main focus is in child welfare and safeguarding children. Her work includes delivering training, presenting at conferences, and engaging in collaborative projects with schools around child abuse awareness and sexual violence prevention. She enjoys writing blogs and poetry on topics she feels passionate about. Judith loves running, gym classes and karate. She is married to an art lecturer and they live in Northamptonshire, England with their three free-spirited children, a 12- year-old son, and daughters aged 11 and 9.

Letter to My Frozen Embryos

Rebecca Lee

I’m sorry I left you there waiting in suspended animation your crystal cradles safely ensconced (or so I pray) in stainless steel under blankets of liquid nitrogen 2 XY + 3 double-X I tallied your perfect chromosomes 46 times just to be sure We lost so many others before Day Read more

Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee is a public interest lawyer by day and writer of poetry and prose by night. A queer writer of color, she is a graduate of Yale College and UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was Senior Articles Editor of the California Law Review and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. Her poetry is forthcoming in Dispatches from Quarantine. She lives in San Francisco with her fiancé and their Goldendoodle, Justice.

The Visitor

Cate Carlyle

I had been to see Mom every Monday and Thursday for the last two years, since the day she arrived. Not that she would have noticed. My visits had become a comforting routine, predictable and unchanging. Each Monday I would stop at William’s Cafe at precisely 9 am and use Read more

Cate Carlyle

Cate Carlyle is a librarian and the author of two young adult novels and a library reference book. Her short story “The Brothers” was shortlisted in the WFNS Nova Writes competition. Cate lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and supportive first-reader Bruce and their fur baby, Zoey.

Witch Way Out

Ernestina Aggrey

I befriended a witch who detests mankind. ‘Men are rarely kind,’ Joy says often, and when she does, I resist the urge to tell her that mankind is just another word for human beings. She loathes corrections, and I don’t want to feel her wrath again. ‘The human race is Read more

Ernestina Aggrey

Ernestina Aggrey is a Black British aspiring writer. She is a law graduate and is currently working on her first novel. She enjoys reading novels filled with characters who are fictional but feel real. She was mentored by Cesca Major after a mentor-mentee match on Black Girl Writers. Her flash fiction is forthcoming in Sweetycat Press and Brittle Paper.

Departure

Julie Anderson

his life is fleeting his spirit walking away cricket cries break through the veil of his eternal night each timid step he makes on brittle bones glued together with a poisonous elixir that drips and overflows pooling around his icicle grey eyes it strips away his beauty one strand of Read more

Julie Anderson

Julie Anderson is the Creator and Publisher of Feminine Collective. Julie was inspired to create this safe place for women to share their secrets, desires, triumphs and pain as the antithesis of what mainstream media offers women today. In her column Pursuit of Perfection, she explores the importance of rectifying the balance of inner and outer beauty through essays, poems and articles on self-esteem, shame, family, and self- acceptance.

MIMI FROM COAST TO COAST

Adrienne Pine

As I write this, a narcissist holds the highest office in our country. The narcissistic personality is one with which I am all too familiar, for I was raised by parents whose narcissism, like Trump’s, went hand-in-hand with crippling insecurity and a lack of impulse control. My mother in particular Read more

Strangers at Birth

Cate Carlyle

My mother wasn’t much of one. If you put aside the fact that she abandoned me, in the winter, less than twenty-four hours after I entered the world, then the note she left propped on my thin yellow cotton blanket said it all: Take her. I can’t do this. I Read more

Cate Carlyle

Cate Carlyle is a librarian and the author of two young adult novels and a library reference book. Her short story “The Brothers” was shortlisted in the WFNS Nova Writes competition. Cate lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and supportive first-reader Bruce and their fur baby, Zoey.

Loupe

Jane Ehrenfeld

Sometimes I say out loud to no one, “I am so tired.” Sometimes I stop in the supermarket aisle, and press my hand hard to my heart, to blunt the ache. My mother often sighed, out of nowhere, long and loud. I don’t think she meant to. I know the Read more

Jane Ehrenfeld

Jane is an educator, lawyer, writer, mediator, and single mom, among other things. She has published nonfiction essays in The Washington Post, Quartz, and The Huffington Post; satirical essays in McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Slackjaw; and works of poetry and short fiction in Prometheus Dreaming, The Dillydoun Review, and Beyond Words.