“10 Books on Ecstatically Mad Women,” Literary Hub
“Intellectually, I recognized that I was negating, erasing, and isolating myself. But my emotional experience was not one of loneliness or loss. On the contrary, I often felt painfully clear, high, satiated, connected to something more than myself. I felt ecstatic.” Read the piece
“Renaissance Rebels: 7 Women Saints Who Resisted,” Electric Literature
“For women, writing about their interior lives, their bodies, and the world as they see and experience it remains a radical act, and one that the saints were participating in hundreds of years ago when they rejected society’s designs to keep them contained and silenced.” Read the piece
Art by A.D. Puchalski.
“Bodies in Space: Teaching After Trauma,” The Rumpus
“It is my first year out of college, and my second week teaching. I have a carefully prepared syllabus, but the syllabus is useless because lower Manhattan is a pile of rubble. I am supposed be teaching American history, but now we are living it.” Read the essay
“Lost Causes at the Festival of St. Rita,” The Florentine
“The vaulted space, normally near-empty, holds people of all ages today—especially women, many of them older and helped along by daughters or nurses—an endless cycle of bodies on this gray morning. They grip roses wrapped in newspaper and make their way slowly to the front of the cathedral, where a statue of Rita stands on a floral bed. ” Read the essay
“Unholy Pilgrimage,” Slice Magazine
“I see St. Margaret preserved in Cortona. I find St. Agnes’s shrunken skull in a church in Rome. I hire a taxi to take me to a convent in the hills beyond Florence in search of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s incorruptible body. You’re going outside of the world, the driver tells me as the roads grow narrower and narrower, and I wonder how and if I will make it home.” Order the issue
“Learning to Love Food Again in Florence,” The Florentine
“My counting and categorizing of food was ritualistic. Stubborn and spiritual, it was rooted in the deepest part of me, and to loose myself of it required new rituals. In many places, but certainly in Italy, food is ritual.” Read the piece
“Autumn Window,” The Sigh Press
“With the window open, sounds cut cleanly to me. The shrieks of birds, the slicing of stone, the couple shouting in the apartment below— their voices crescendo as though this battle, repeated each day, might be their last.” Read the piece
“Naked Woman Eating Portobello Mushrooms,” Bluestem Magazine
“The women's dorm was housed in a large brick warehouse in a dark corner of the desolate city, and its walls reverberated nightly with each woman's answer to their common cry.” Order the issue