nonfiction

Helena offers some poetic “impressions” from her daily journaling practice, plus a requested and imagined end to the two-part monkey story from March and May.

In her 44th post, Helena Clare Pittman tells the second part of her March story of adolescent rebellion.

A memoir isn’t about recording everything that’s ever happened to us. It’s about building a narrative around a soul theme.

When I was fourteen and life had taken its hormonal turn, pushing me out of the childhood home that I thought was permanent, I bought a monkey...

[I began] opening the images I carried with me to find the experience, the meaning, the feeling, the story...As I wrote them, they became...the story of my first-generation American family...

My older sister, Jolene, was the ringleader in our sister group. It was a group of only us two...We were an organism. Where did she stop and I begin? I can't find a fixed edge...