[Written for catapult magazine’s Sensory Experience issue https://www.catapultmagazine.com/sensory-experience/article/she-heightened-my-awareness-of-the-world%5D From across the uncleared dinner table, my grandmother feeds me stories—how she ran opossum traps in the morning before school, how she gathered herbs on the Round Bluff, how she watched her little brother die of pneumonia. I listen to the same ones over and over, because […]
My younger daughter is watching people from her hospital bed in the ER. “I feel like I’m on the Hogwarts’ train, you know, when all the people keep passing by the compartment?” Passing through the frame, only for a few seconds…a woman pushing a cart overflowing with bins full of files, a white-coated man pushing another […]
At 7, my son is in earnest. Gripping the back of the seat as we drive to the grocery store, he asks, “What should I be when I grow up?” This is not a “why is the sky blue?” kind of question. The almost pleading tone in his voice begs me to answer; not a […]
Random mayhem. This could describe our weekly family night on occasion but seemed to be the official theme Thursday night when six of us gathered around the table for a game of Quelf. The rest of the family just didn’t have the energy…and it takes a lot to play this game, the gist of which […]
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be teaching a media writing course at the college where I work full time in public relations. I also serve as an adjunct faculty member. Ironically, I applied for a similar position in the English department about 10 years ago, and my interview with the very erudite professor fell […]
The first time my elder daughter tells me she’s going on a date, I will die. Maybe not all of me, but that part that believes she will always be content to sit at the computer chatting online with her friends or watching reruns of “The Nanny” with me at midnight. I’ve had it easy, […]
“My mother was baptized in the Mississippi River,” she had said many times, always adding the all important “wearing her blue dress with the white polka dots.”
Amanda Cleary Eastep 