City on a Hill: Admission of an Older Student

“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

Matthew 5:14

“[this is] for refusing to believe in miracles

because miracles are the impossible coming true

and everything is possible

this is for the possibility that guides us

and for the possibilities still waiting to sing

and spread their wings inside us”

Andrea Gibson, “Say Yes”

“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like the arctic tundra or sea ice.”

-Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Stranger in a Strange Land: Reflections on the MIRID/MDA Biannual Conference

“Don’t be nervous. The Deaf people are nice, it’s the Hearies you have to watch out for!”

-Interpreter at MIRD/ MDA conference

Stranger in a Strange Land:

Reflections on the MIRID/MDA Biannual Conference

Undated Journal Entry

Forgive us our placeholders, who kept us warm over the years while we dreamed of someone who filled the space better

Six Word Memoirs

 As a writing exercise we were asked to come up with Six Word Memoirs.

Head in Kalamazoo, heart in Marquette.

Needs to stop nailing same musician.

Reclusive writer embarks on uncertain career.

Wishes she could be a bird.

Wine, books, and romance end me.

I’ve read this one: she lives.

Up North

One day I will be middle aged and I shall sweatshirts with technicolor stripes and silhouettes of moose and bears on them. I will tell people I bought it “Up North”.  Mackinac will be “Up North” and you and I will go “Up North” on the weekends.  Life will cease to exist for us above the bridge.

And sometimes you get a paragraph

     We go to bed and I'm going to be a gentleman here and leave it at that. We go to bed. Fade to black. It's like old times. We've never been great communicators but we can move air. Lo's familiar. I see her when she's not here, feel her. The shapes the contours, the scar on her thigh from a curling iron accident; she's all there. We talk with the air between us in grunts and fingers and nails. It's an argument. Then it crescendos and fades, we have cigarettes and I pass out.

            In the morning Lo's gone.

Sometimes you only get one good line...

I get home late one night after closing at work. She's there on my couch reading a garage sale copy of Anna Karenina. Accurate. Harsh but accurate. I'm not Vronsky, I'm the fucking train.