Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
Nearly eight years after my father’s death, I received a phone call from the nurse I had hired at the end of his life. Jen was a kind and compassionate person, and she had been at his side when he passed away. Because of her other commitments, she was unable Read more
Adrienne Pine's creative nonfiction has been published in The Write Place at the Write Time, Tale of Four Cities, The Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, and other venues.
Summer meant grandma’s 80’s brown conversion van. Brown carpet, brown velvet curtains, semi-sheer accordion blinds and dimpled beige leather seats and a third row, pulled at the rusts into a bed. A speaker system more elaborate than the dash and a giant bread cupboard that actually stored a mini box TV. Read more
Ericka Russell is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. After obtaining her BA at Ohio University, she received her MFA from Western Kentucky University. Ericka now pursues college instruction, photography, and outdooring.
My delight at the ultrasound tech’s declaration, “It’s a girl,” was immediately followed by a heaviness and fear I associated with that specific gender reveal: the food thing. I did not feel this panic a year ago when the sex of my son was announced. Food things were girl things. Read more
Liv Spikes writes about her life-- it seems to offer up plenty of material. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Brain, Child Literary Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, and others.
Youngest leaves for college today. Our house appears to understand. Our house appears to understand. Water heater breaks, ceiling weeps. I grab a mop, sweep up the weeps. Sam the Appliance Man is booked. Every plumber in town is booked. She carries on, keeps packing up. Nothing stops her from Read more
Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in The Feminine Collective, The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Dear Damsels, The Tulane Review, and elsewhere. Her novel, Little Miss Chaos, was selected as a Best Indie Teen Read by Kirkus, and her first poetry collection, At Any Given Second, received a Kirkus star. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans.
The shape of heavy tears streaking down, earthwards, journeying to find our loved ones faces, again The shape of trembling lips the very moment we recall their forevermore absence as we write the date, on this day their birthday The shape of the book on the shelf in the store, Read more
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.
August 2016 I’m kneeling in the aisle like a worshipper dropping tears into the white ceramic shell of an armadillo. What else would you do on your inaugural Target run in a new town you thought you would love but don’t even like? Read more
Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri. After parting ways with her faith, she went on to earn a BA in Literature, teach ninth grade reading, and achieve her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She is the author of three unpublished novels. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, StoryQuarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review. She is the winner of the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction.
My mom had it. I know she had hair in all of the pictures of her before I was born. I know she had hair when I was little. I know she got her hair done at Menage e Trois Coiffers on Burton Way, and I didn’t know what “Menage Read more
A Los Angeles native, Sarah M. Levy was an English teacher in NYC for 21 years. She is a founding member of the experimental theater company The New York Neo-Futurists, and a recipient of The NY Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Performance Art Production. She has performed her work on Selected Shorts and at The Green Room 42, and she has been published in 225.Plays: By The New York Neo-Futurists from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Sarah received her MA in English Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and her BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Chicago. A member of The Writers Studio at The Center for Fiction, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.
I can’t remember where I was when Father got home that day. Probably, I was somewhere inside the house; maybe I was in the living room. Maybe sitting cross-legged on the dingy, frayed oriental rug that had tufts of cat and dog and probably human hair tangled in its tassels Read more
I was a clueless kid back then but I always followed my heart; I knew I wanted to be a Writer but I didn't know what that meant, or what my options were. So I became an Editor--it was something that just came naturally to me. Twenty-plus years later, I'm still an Editor. It has served me well, at least in the day-to-day; and when you're in survival mode, just getting through the day is enough. But at roughly the midway mark of my career, and looking up from the precipice of what must have been my 17th relapse, I thought that maybe this was just my destiny, and if so, there simply had to be value in chronicling it. And while my reasons for writing a memoir may have been tenuous and ever-evolving, it was never about catharsis. Instead, by reliving the trauma of my upbringing and the desperation of my youth, I discovered that I had had agency all along, in my own twisted way; and I felt compelled to share that revelation and have spent years searching for a platform to do just that--until I found the Feminine Collective. I invite you to engage therein with this ongoing series of excerpts from my debut memoir, "Constellation of Pleasure: Only the Stars Can Hear Me," a tale unduly tragic, but through which I expect readers will perceive a reflection of themselves to whatever degree, and be empowered.
